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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/27947759">Libretto</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/pennysgrace/pseuds/pennysgrace'>pennysgrace</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Victoria (TV)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, F/M, Happy Ending, Hurt/Comfort, Marriage, Misunderstandings, Non-Linear Narrative, Romance, Slow Burn, Vicbourne, character-driven, introspective</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>In-Progress</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-12-09</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-12-14</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-10 23:29:09</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>2</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>40,836</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/27947759</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/pennysgrace/pseuds/pennysgrace</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p><em>“Well, I’m not going to get married just to please you.”</em><br/> <br/><em>She has learned so many lessons from him in the years that he has been everything to her from friend, to advisor, to the greatest affection of her heart. The lesson she will, perhaps, need most in the coming weeks is that sometimes the most selfless way to love someone is by lying to them.</em></p><p>Albert travels to England at his uncle's bidding to woo Cousin Victoria, but finds the same obstacle at every turn: her Lord M.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>William Lamb 2nd Viscount Melbourne &amp; Victoria of the United Kingdom (1819-1901), William Lamb 2nd Viscount Melbourne/Victoria of the United Kingdom (1819-1901)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>40</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>59</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>1. Piano Sonata No. 1 in F minor, Prestissimo</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Hi guys!</p><p>First, if you're reading this fic, thank you. I would really love it if you would leave a comment. They're a large part of what makes fanfiction worthwhile for authors. Any words are very treasured.</p><p>Second, this fic has a bit of a complicated pov situation, so at the start of every chapter I'll list the pov's. This one contains Present Day (Ep. 4) Albert, Flashback Victoria, and Flashback Lord M.</p><p>Third, this fic is Vicbourne all the way, have no fear. I just have a penchant of warming up my happy endings with a bit of angst first. </p><p>And that's pretty much it. Enjoy the fic and let me know what you think!</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <em>Drina is very little, only a girl, when Lehzen gives her an exquisite book of stories for her birthday. She is not allowed many books. Sir John must always read them first and approve them, but Lehzen is allowed to read out to her from her new book for a half an hour every night before bed, and Drina thinks that she has never before been given such a lovely gift.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Her favorite story is about the courageous knight who saves the princess from her tower, but she never tells Lehzen why.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Her lessons have changed already. She is no longer allowed to play outside for more than a few minutes a day, and Sir John has begun swatting her spine with her copy book every time she lets her shoulders droop, even when she is so sleepy, she does not even want a story before bed.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>There are soldiers posted outside the gates.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>She wonders, very drowsily one night, just how brave her knight will have to be to rescue her from her growing tower.</em>
</p><p>~</p><p>Albert is twenty when Uncle Leopold finally sends for him.</p><p>After all this time, to England they go. He wonders what he will find there and his mind swims with her, the operas he knows she prefers, the dances she likes best. He was sixteen when his tutors began teaching him more about his cousin than about mathematics and philosophy, and though he has continued his higher studies on his own, the last four years of his education have left him feeling as though he has more knowledge of Victoria than he does of most young women he has, in fact, been introduced to.</p><p>He does hope she no longer plays with the dolls.</p><p>He was nineteen when his Uncle ordered his tutors to teach him about her Prime Minister. Nineteen, and she was a year into her reign. Ernest has joked for nearly a year now that his little brother knows more about Whig policy than most Englishmen do, but Albert can only shake his head throughout the carriage ride toward England, because it is not only Whig policy that he has been taught.</p><p><em>Melbourne.</em> The man is entrenched in more scandal than anyone he has ever known, and are the English truly so careless that they let such a man command their government?</p><p>Uncle Leopold tells him Victoria much favors the man, and Albert thinks it is cheap. He thinks it irresponsible of a politician, <em>unconscionable,</em> in fact, to make himself pleasing to the Queen on occasion for the sole purpose of gaining what political support she has to give.</p><p>Does the man have no conscience? Does he have no care for his own Queen?</p><p>And he counts himself fortunate, as the carriage ride turns into a channel crossing and Albert buys his first English newspaper, with Melbourne’s name and recent accomplishments in their parliament printed on both the second and third pages, that politicians are not royals, and that the two of them need, perhaps, never meet.</p><p>Melbourne, after all, is not a guest at Buckingham Palace, invited by the Queen.</p><p>~</p><p>
  <em>She is eighteen the first time she is allowed to descend a flight of stairs unaided or to sleep in the privacy of her own room. Eighteen when a man first bows before her and prays God to save the Queen.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Eighteen when it is her ancestral duty to meet the Prime Minister alone, and her impressions of him that first day are, admittedly, somewhat confused.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>They call him disreputable, but she is too busy trying desperately to steel her courage to pay much heed to the rumors Lehzen repeats in a scandalized whisper. All she knows is that his favor is sought with the utmost devotion by Sir John when the politician arrives on the back of a horse only a few hours past daybreak, and that she dreads whatever it is Sir John is whispering to him about her on the steps below her window.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Tales of hysteria and insanity, no doubt, or at the very least, incompetency. Sir John will make up the man’s mind about her before she ever meets him face to face, and then where will she be?</em>
</p><p>
  <em>In a larger house, she supposes, but really, nowhere new.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>For eighteen years she has lived as a prisoner, and now freedom is so close, she is almost afraid to reach out and grasp it.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>But this man, this Lord Melbourne, he might take it from her forever if she allows it.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>She will never, ever let him.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>~</em>
</p><p>
  <em>He feels so old. So tired.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>The last weeks and months, even the last years of the King’s life are cold ones for the Prime Minister. They are wearisome, vaguely uncomfortable things, and he fills them with much brandy to drown out the unbearable quiet and to dull the persistent ache. Nothing much happens, nothing much goes awry, perhaps because he has reached an age at which he has grown too tired to cause a scandal.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>It simply passes, the time, and he watches it go like a dazed onlooker at a race.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>And then the King dies, and he swallows mouthfuls of coffee to sharpen his brandy-heavy mind before riding out to meet a girl-Queen that no one important has seen more than a glimpse or two of in far too many years.</em>
</p><p>~</p><p>
  <em>She thinks, when the Prime Minister--Lord Melbourne, she reminds herself--lowers himself to one knee and kisses her hand very lightly, that he must be one of the strangest men she has ever met. She does not know why; supposes, at the time, that it might be some combination of the striking green of his eyes, and the odd lilac tint to his cheeks, and the slight rasp of his voice. </em>
</p><p>
  <em>Later she will correct herself and decide that it was without question the kindness of his words that she thinks so odd, and the weariness of his eyes, but at eighteen and not yet crowned she has hardly any time to think at all. They are speaking to one another--actually conversing--and she cannot remember if anyone aside from Lehzen has ever thought her worth the effort of truly discussing matters with. She finds herself woefully unprepared, realizing too late that she has prepared herself only to escape Kensington, but that he seems to be searching for something else, something more complicated and personal, and she--</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Has never once been prompted to learn her own mind. And so her tongue runs away with her.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>She hears herself say things like “A prince with a head the size of a pumpkin!” and “I remember thinking my uncle’s crown would be too big for me,” and she is mortified.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>She thinks she will surely die of shame when he takes the childish doll into his unhesitating hands and examines her. Incompetent, Sir John has surely told him, and perhaps, she thinks while looking with him at the doll, Sir John was right. The fierce panic that has always made its home inside her is battering her from within now, her constant companion always so close to the surface.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>The doubt steadily mounting inside of her does not stop her from absolutely refusing to allow Sir John to act as her private secretary, however, and she will spare this Lord Melbourne no kind words for suggesting such a thing.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Except...he does not. He merely tells her and...listens.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>“That is out of the question.”</em>
</p><p>
  <em>“I see.”</em>
</p><p>
  <em> “He means to run me, as he runs my mother.”</em>
</p><p>
  <em>“Well, then you must have someone else.”</em>
</p><p>
  <em>It is dizzying, the lack of effort required to make him see, to make him understand and agree with her. It is so easy that it takes her breath away. Lord Melbourne, for a single moment, is perhaps the most beautiful thing she has ever seen.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>But then he says “Perhaps I might act for you,” and it all comes crashing down into a heap. Of course. Why should he allow Sir John to run her when he desires to himself? It should have been obvious from the very first, but he almost had her convinced that he might be deserving of her trust.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Almost.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Never again.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>She despises herself a little, in that moment, for her naivety. She will have to learn much faster than this if she hopes at all to remain free. He goes on about documents and Privy Councils, and she understands almost none of it at all, though she wishes bitterly that she did. Maybe then she would not be fighting to keep her hands from trembling.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>“Thank you, Lord Melbourne, but when I require assistance I will ask for it.”</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Never, ever. She will be free, and nothing he can say will ever tempt her to make her home inside a cage again.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>And he is gone.</em>
</p><p>~</p><p>Albert has been in England not even two hours when he first sees Lord Melbourne’s name printed next to Cousin Victoria’s.</p><p>A newspaper sketch. The two of them are drawn riding out.</p><p>He frowns. How strange they are, these English. How...frivolous and uncaring for privacy. For decency. For <em>truth. </em>They have a parliament, they have great minds like Dickens and Bain, and yet they choose to report baseless gossip about their Queen.</p><p>About Victoria.</p><p>Hours later, he is still frowning.</p><p>~</p><p>
  <em>His meeting with Conroy on the steps of Kensington, he must confess, does not fill him with great optimism.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>There is something cloying about this place. Something ill and pained, and he is far too familiar with both traits to believe that such an atmosphere has not affected the young Queen Conroy so exerts himself to keep hidden from him.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>After Conroy it is the German battle-ax of a governess, and after her it is the daunting flight of stairs. She seems locked away in a tower, this girl, and for a swift moment he dreads what he will find when he steps over the final threshold and is finally allowed to kneel before her.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>But what he finds is neither a fragile invalid, nor an incapable child. Instead, he is quite abruptly faced by a shockingly small, wary girl who for some reason is guarded as though she is as delicate as a wisp of smoke. Oh, he wants so badly to laugh when she opens her mouth and tells him about English cousins, and arranged marriages, and dolls with numbers instead of names, and crowns that are too big, because he sees it in a flash, and he is startled to find himself intrigued by something for the first time in longer than he cares to remember.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>In all this dark, dreary, dying place, this tiny girl dressed in a mourning gown that is impressively ill-suited to her might just be the most stubbornly alive creature he has ever seen. Conroy is in for a nasty shock with this one, he thinks, and perhaps he is as well. All of England is, no doubt, going to be taken aback by such a small, fierce Queen who will not have Conroy’s version of help and is too skittish yet to accept his own.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>More coffee, he decides as he obeys her unspoken command to leave.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>He may need to rethink this.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>He may need to rethink her.</em>
</p><p>~</p><p>
  <em>Lord Melbourne does not stay away for long, and though she is not at all delighted to see his face in the sea of important men at her first Privy Council, his form is, at the very least, one of the few recognizable to her.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>The speech is a nightmare of nerves. So many glowering faces. Uncle Cumberland’s foremost in her sight, and she is too quiet, too small. Tiny, little Alexandrina sent out to face down an army alone.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>“Can’t hear you!”</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Uncle Cumberland.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>And he is there. Lord Melbourne, right at the front, and he nods to her like he has heard the cry of alarm that she is certain has not escaped the confines of her mind, and is now answering her with a calm word of reassurance that likewise, does not escape the confines of his own.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>She does not know Lord Melbourne. Such a gesture is terribly forward of him. She should, perhaps, be offended by it and tell him that he thinks too much of himself the next time she is required to meet with him alone, but she already knows that she will do none of these things. </em>
</p><p>
  <em>Alexandrina, sent out to face an army alone, will, apparently, take refuge at any port in a storm.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>And so she goes on.</em>
</p><p>~</p><p>
  <em>The satisfaction that comes with the completion of her speech lasts only long enough for the first lord to kneel before her, and for her to realize that she does not know his name.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>She does not know any of their names.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Her stomach sinks straight down to her toes, and the horrible moment seems to stretch on and on without end. She can feel the heat in her face, the churning of her stomach, because they are right, all of them with their glowering eyes. No matter what she has just claimed in her speech, she cannot do this at all. And then--</em>
</p><p>
  <em>“Lord Ilchester.”</em>
</p><p>
  <em>She has never been so relieved in her entire life. She is certain of it. It crashes into her with so much force that she is grateful to be sitting down, sure that if she were standing, she would be knocked from her feet with it.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Never has a voice been so welcome.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>“Lord Ilchester,” she echoes swiftly and obediently, and though she knows it is a bit rushed and a bit high-pitched, it is correct, and she cannot bring herself to care about the rest.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>There are more, and he knows the name of every single one, Lord Melbourne with his quiet, unassuming presence beside her. She thinks he must be the only part of the room that is not spinning, and she is so very grateful to have him by her side.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>She thinks...yes, she thinks that she may have misjudged him rather badly before. </em>
</p><p>
  <em>Perhaps.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Only time, she supposes, will tell.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>~</em>
</p><p>
  <em>When she hears him call her “Queen Victoria” for the first time, once more persuaded to her cause so effortlessly, she knows she has chosen well.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>The sound of his voice carries her all the way to the balcony and back.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>~</em>
</p><p>She plays very well.</p><p>Albert has never liked uniforms, with the heavy braid and stiff collars, but Uncle Leopold will have his way, and so as night falls, Albert and Ernest are being driven to Buckingham Palace with starched shirts, shining boots, and a great deal of nervousness where Albert is concerned, at least.</p><p>The number of windows, the number of <em>candles,</em> is staggering, even for a Queen, and his wariness grows with each step along gilded halls that seem so foreign. These English...well, there is nothing like this at home. No extravagance even approaching this.</p><p>
  <em>How rich does a woman have to be to manage it all?</em>
</p><p>But he stops thinking of money quickly enough, because then there is Beethoven, and Victoria looks very well in the candlelight. Perhaps he can understand a little of why she seems so fond of it, though why she requires so much of it is still beyond his understanding.</p><p>
  <em>At least she chooses excellent music.</em>
</p><p>He is expected to speak to her, he knows. Expected to smile at her now, when they first meet after so many years, and so he swallows back against rapidly mounting anxiety—<em>so many people to hear her play. So many eyes to watch him—</em>and turns her final page for her.</p><p>“Victoria.”</p><p>She has grown, he realizes. She is no longer the child he has been taught about, all these years. In the time that has passed since he last saw her, she has, apparently, become a woman. He can see it in her eyes and he wonders what has made her change so, because <em>this</em>…this woman who looks like Victoria but whose expression makes her a stranger to him, is not the Victoria he was told to expect.</p><p>“Albert.”</p><p>He does it, he <em>smiles </em>for her, though he feels his cheeks warming a little to be standing before so many, and Victoria…</p><p>Does not smile back.</p><p>Instead he is barked at by her lapdog and ignored entirely by Victoria. Indeed, she <em>mocks</em> him to her dog and leaves him to stand alone before all the people gathered to watch her play.</p><p>That night he learns many things. The first is that Victoria, though she may look as much like a Coburg as he does, is entirely English. The second is that he should believe everything he has ever read and heard about Lord Melbourne, and more. Albert cannot understand it, how the man manages to to command Victoria’s attention from all the way across the room, but undeniably, he somehow does. She looks to him while she speaks to Albert, and Lord Melbourne comes to her just like her lapdog when she calls. Victoria lives in this palace full of expensive candles, finely tuned pianos, and priceless paintings, yet she seems not to care much for any of it—including him—except her <em>Lord M</em>.</p><p>He passes the next morning largely without her company. The little of it she graces him with—during a fascinating demonstration of the new English postage permit, their <em>stamps</em>—is filled with her giggles. He feels the heat in his face again, cannot look at her because he cannot tell if she thinks him ridiculous, or if she is trying to make him so.</p><p>Then she leaves and sequesters herself away with Lord Melbourne for <em>three hours.</em></p><p>He has never heard of such a thing. Not even Uncle Leopold spends so much time in the presence of his advisors. Left to his own devices, Albert drags Ernest from the palace to go see England for themselves. If Victoria does not prize her paintings or think highly of English invention, that is her own affair. He need not be swayed by her. He sees much that day; looks at enough paintings to leave him stunned by the abundance of art and history she has at her disposal, only a scant carriage ride away. </p><p>He also sees the children. The ones who have no wool to wear, though the weather bites at even him with cold. The ones who sell matchsticks for their supper.</p><p>Once again, he thinks, they have nothing like this at home.</p><p>~</p><p>
  <em>They are much thrown together in the crush of her first few weeks as Queen, and he is not so blind as to fancy himself wholly immune to her peculiar little charms. </em>
</p><p>
  <em>On the contrary, she is his grand fascination, with her strange mixture of grandeur and naivety, two things that, frankly, should not have room to coexist in one so small. He is caught up in her, and whether it is the distraction the daunting task of convincing Parliament of her virtues provides, or the full schedule that preparing her for the initial tasks as sovereign requires, he feels as though he has been suffocating slowly for years and has only just been allowed to finally breathe.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>She laughs with glee at what he knows to be her Uncle’s fiscal insanity as she sees Buckingham House for the first time. When she speaks of Kensington before going in, when he remembers the gloom of the place she has only just left and watches her trot through the wide, sunny spaces of the veritable palace her predecessor has left for her, he thinks that maybe she has been suffocating too, and that now they are both breathing more easily together.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>There must be something to it, this shared sense of newly-found lightness, whether she can sense it or not. He doubts she can, she is so young and relatively unspoiled. There must be a bonding to be found in it, because they are easier here, the two of them. He thinks, perhaps, that they are learning each other's ways. That she is learning that he is not Conroy, and that he is learning that she is both more capable and more afraid than he previously assumed her to be.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>She may be rejoicing in her freedom, but he can still see the shadows of her time at Kensington clinging to her with all their might.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>“They all think that because I’m small, I’m still a child! They’ve always underestimated me. They expect me to fail.” She pauses and takes a great shuddering breath as though steeling her nerve, then finally confesses “They don’t believe me capable of being Queen.”</em>
</p><p>
  <em>He knows a great deal about shadows.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>He, admittedly, does not have much light to lend her. Whatever lightness he has found in the past weeks has, in fact, come to him from her. From the thrill of watching her stand her very straightest and fight against the throng that does, indeed, expect her to fail. From the blessed occupation he has found in ensuring that she proves them all wrong and succeeds. It is so like watching a baby bird try to fly for the first time only to realize that, if unaided, it will inevitably fall, that he cannot help but catch her.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>He has great faith in her wings. He knows that one day they will send her soaring splendidly.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>But he also knows that they have not grown all of their feathers yet, and that what she needs is time and help. Not to be controlled.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>“I think They’re mistaken, Ma’am.”</em>
</p><p>
  <em>He knows they are. She is fierce, this one, if terribly sheltered and inexperienced. She will put them all in their place in the end if he does his job well.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>“And anyone who dares comment on your stature should be sent straight to the tower.”</em>
</p><p>
  <em>She smiles for him and he feels as though he has won a great victory. Her smiles have not come easily thus far, and he sees the droop of her shoulders and the anxious tenseness of her brow. If she will let him, he can carry some of the weight for her, will keep the worst of it from her doorstep and still allow her to run free. He certainly has no desire to restrain her. She is capable, as he tells her, of being every inch a Queen.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>By the end of the day he is acting as her private secretary and it seems they have finally found their stride together.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>By the end of the day she is calling him Lord M, and it occurs to him that he might just be in very great danger, indeed.</em>
</p><p>~</p><p>
  <em>She feels as though she is flying.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>All of her memories, when she thinks back, are of the terrible confines of Kensington. Of Sir John’s hand slapping her face sharply, or his loud voice shouting that she is a stupid, foolish girl, or of Mama’s incessant weeping for her to just submit to Sir John, because surely he knows what is best. She remembers the constant dread of being seventeen instead of eighteen when the crown finally came to her, but all of her present is bright, and clear, and hers for the taking, like nothing in her entire life has ever been before.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>It is exhilarating.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>He teaches her so much, Lord M. He knows...everything. The answer to every question she could ever ask. The daily boxes are piled high with daunting gibberish to her until he joins her in her study and gives her such a thorough, diverting explanation of the proceedings laid out before her in a mess on her desk that years of utterly baffling lessons given to her by Lehzen on the Constitution suddenly slide into place, making perfect sense thanks to his delightful tutelage. Riding out to inspect the troops or, in fact, riding out at all, is considerably less terrifying when he is with her, and she is certain she could not face the lords and ladies of court without him by her side. He is her constant ballast, indispensable to her. Sir John, and Mama, and Lady Flora, they all try to come between them, to keep her from the only person who has ever truly convinced her that she is capable of being Queen. They are all constantly trying to pull her back down to earth, but Lord M makes her feel as though she is high above them all and will never land.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>She knows now, she misjudged him that first day.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>For her Lord M, she is nothing but grateful.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>~</em>
</p><p>
  <em>He watches her.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>They spend a great deal of time together, and he watches her sit so straight in her saddle as troops march by. Watches her eyes flit over the court ladies with a mixture of awe, jealousy, and embarrassment reflected in them. He watches her try, and try, and fail, and learn, and listen, and with each passing day his confidence in her grows.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>That little bit of fire inside of her will take her far; he is certain of it.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Parliament is not so easily convinced, but he beats the jackals back with more vigor than he has felt for governing in years. Idle paperwork and the business of steering an old country straight are admirable things, but they are jobs for younger men. Jobs that his heart has not been invested in for a long while. Now though, he has someone to fight for and everything is born anew. It’s like being a young man again, and he thinks that he has never before accomplished so much in so little time. He tries harder for her, applies himself more thoroughly, and is pleased to see her do the same.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>That little bit of fire inside of her will take him far too, it would seem, and he is grateful to her for reminding him what it is to be truly awake once more.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>She chooses her ladies, they plan a coronation ball that he does not even attempt to deny her, and all the while, there is Conroy. If he watches her, then Conroy watches him, and he wonders now at the rumors of her great illness the year before her eighteenth birthday. The rumors of the regency Conroy attempted to force on her. She must be keeping a backbone of iron hidden beneath all the uncertainty she has shown since establishing herself in London to have escaped all that. Conroy has far from given in though, but at least the odious creature’s hostility is focused on him now, rather than on the Queen. He can manage being called a selfish Whig or even a cad if it will spare her the trouble of suffering Sir John’s vile moods. He knows the truth. Knows that he is being neither selfish nor a cad. At least, not in this. Not with her. For once in his life, he holds himself to a higher standard. </em>
</p><p>
  <em>She has reminded him to, all unknowing, after far too many years.<br/></em>
</p><p>
  <em>He knows, as he looks into a mirror and stares himself deeply in the eyes, that this is dangerous. That there are rumors. That people call her Mrs. Melbourne, and that he cares for the girl who is now Queen more than is perhaps proper for the Prime Minister to care for his sovereign. He has become too invested, too involved, but there is nothing for it because he cannot imagine how any of this could have been done differently. What he also knows is that none of it matters now or ever will. Because it is dangerous, he will see that it is kept firmly in check. Because there are rumors, he will never allow them to grow into a scandal. Because he cares for her, because she is a fierce, lovely young girl who possesses kindness and intelligence in abundance, and because he has most unwisely become attached to her, he will always watch over her and make certain that nothing is ever allowed to harm her beyond healing.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Not even him.</em>
</p><p>~</p><p>Lord Melbourne is everywhere.</p><p>Albert passes Victoria in the hall and Lord Melbourne is by her side.</p><p>He hears her voice from within the library and Lord Melbourne’s replies.</p><p>He watches from the window of his bedroom as Lord Melbourne’s carriage rolls up the drive because Victoria has invited him to dine with them.</p><p>Perhaps the newspaper he bought, the one with the sketch, has been not been printing only lies.</p><p>~</p><p>
  <em>She gets drunk.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>But of course, the trouble starts before that. It starts with the rumors. He is now of interest to the public eye again and so is his past; even if she has only been privy to the very barest details on the subject, they have understandably been enough to pique her curiosity.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>“I wonder that you have not married again, Lord M.”</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Her mother is perhaps right in that they should not so often be seen in the exclusive company of one another--he tells her as much--but she is content and learning and he is pleased to teach her all she needs to know. Is pleased to pass his time with her because she makes him smile and staunches the feeling of dull emptiness that has hounded him for the past several years. Because the spark in her eyes is lovely and he has grown so terribly, unwittingly fond of her, and he does not care to leave her unattended for any length of time with Conroy so constantly near. But now a conversation begun about her mother has led them here, to his marriage, and he is at a loss to explain to someone so young and unaccustomed to the darker ways of the world what he can scarcely comprehend after living through it himself. To dredge up old memories that she has only just chased away.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>“My wife died a few years ago and I’ve...never been able to replace her. She was not a model wife, by any means, but she was enough for me.”</em>
</p><p>
  <em>The words sound ridiculous, even to his own ears. They make the entirety of his marriage sound almost civil. He wonders if she knows that he has just wrapped up years and years of utter insanity and devastation into a few paltry phrases, but how can she? He knows very well that she has never been truly wounded by grief.<br/></em>
</p><p>
  <em>“You did not mind she ran away with Lord Byron?”</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Too innocent, it seems, as it should be. Untouched by such things.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>“Yes, I minded.”</em>
</p><p>
  <em>“But you did not disown her? I think I would find such behavior hard to forgive.”</em>
</p><p>
  <em>And he knows that she is, as he tells her, too young to understand.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>~</em>
</p><p>
  <em>She can scarcely breathe for the nerves.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>She almost wants to cancel it, the ball, just so that she will not have to walk, and talk, and behave like a Queen in front of everybody. </em>
</p><p><em>She wants Lord M. He always knows what to do. </em> <em>Just hours ago she believed herself to be ready for this, felt nothing but excitement at the prospect, but now, in his absence, she finds room for doubt.</em></p><p>
  <em>She does walk, and she can feel what seems like every single pair of eyes fixed on her. Her mouth is so dry with the nerves, it seems no matter how much she drinks she cannot unstick her tongue from the roof of her mouth.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>“Where is Lord M? I expected him hours ago.”</em>
</p><p>
  <em>He has never before left her to brave both Mama and Conroy, as well as the entire court, all alone. Surely he will not abandon her now?</em>
</p><p>
  <em>She finds, in the meantime, that she can not only walk like a Queen without him, but can talk and even dance. She also finds that she does not particularly want to do so. She has grown so accustomed to having him near to her and always ready to reassure her. Always ready with an answer, should she find herself at a loss. The Russian Grand Duke is certainly handsome and charming, a most diverting dancing partner, but his presence does not have the same wonderfully calming effect as Lord M’s. Not at all, but she manages.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>And then she no longer has to, because there he is. She glimpses him in the crowd and something tense and anxious in the pit of her belly loosens, and the night becomes enjoyable once more.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>~</em>
</p><p>
  <em>He feels his age all the way to his bones, and nothing at all but the Queen herself could have roused him from his house tonight.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Of all nights, of course it would be.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>“You have been missed,” Emma whispers, though he cannot see why. The Queen seems perfectly content in the Grand Duke’s care. She sparkles, in fact, in the candlelight, and it is not just the effect of her diamonds, he thinks.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>“She seems to be managing quite well.”</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Indeed, she seems to require nothing of him but his presence, and he watches as she spins across the floor, drinking champagne between partners. She seems to float; to pay no heed to the crowd and all the eyes that remain fixed on her. Only the two glasses of champagne he watches her drink in rapid succession betray her anxiousness, and he should perhaps give her a word of caution before she drinks too much and begins to spin out of control.<br/></em>
</p><p>
  <em>His age, yes, he feels it. She seems to shine like the sun, laughing, which he supposes makes him something akin to the waning moon.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>“Are you going to watch her all night?”</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Emma, and she, at least, can see him for the old fool that he is, but he can't help it just now because he does not wish to be here tonight of all nights, but the Queen has summoned him and so here he is.<br/></em>
</p><p>
  <em>“She’s completely artless, of course.” She has no experience of the kind of mean, underhanded games played by the members of her court. She is unspoiled by them, though he imagines she will not remain so for long. “She no sooner has a thought than she expresses it.” Her innocence makes her too bold. It allows her to describe her cousin as pumpkin-headed and to ask after his late wife. “She is too impulsive for a Queen. And yet…”</em>
</p><p>
  <em>And yet.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>And yet he is here and  can do nothing but watch her because she is always so very alive, and maybe if he stands close enough the warmth of her will continue to be contagious to him, and he will make it through the night with at least a portion of his struggling heart still intact.<br/></em>
</p><p>
  <em>Emma sees. Emma knows and understands.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>He sees too. Sees the Grand Duke take her in his arms again. Sees his hands in places they ought not to be, and even if the boy is an honored guest, the Queen has no need to be accosted in her own ballroom.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>He interferes. As the Grand Duke is led away he steps forward, a distraction from her champagne, and he is reminded once again of how small she truly is as he takes her in his arms. Dancing. They are dancing on his son’s birthday. Dancing for her coronation. Dancing because he cannot watch her come to harm or scandal.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Dancing, and was he really kneeling before her for the first time only a few months ago? It seems an age, as though he has been by her side for as long as he can remember, and yet he knows it to be false because he has the grief, always the grief, to remind him of just how much time has gone by.<br/></em>
</p><p>
  <em>“I thought you weren’t going to come.”</em>
</p><p>
  <em>He would not have, had she not insisted.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>“I had a matter to attend to.”</em>
</p><p>
  <em>But he is apparently incapable of denying her.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>“I thought, perhaps, you were cross with me.”</em>
</p><p>
  <em>She is so very young and bright.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>“With you? Never.”</em>
</p><p>
  <em>He is so enchanted by her, he is not certain he could be truly cross with her if he tried.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>“You dance so well. I wish I could dance with you every night.”</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Tipsy. She is most assuredly tipsy. Why has Emma not kept a check on the girl’s champagne? No matter, she is with him now, and he will never repeat her words. But the look in her eyes, the wistfulness in her voice, they make him think, for the briefest moment, of Conroy and his lurid insinuations. He is, in fact, a man, and she is a very young and impressionable woman. He tells her so, and she takes offense, as he knew she would, and if he were not the apparent cause of her wistfulness he might delight in her indignation.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>“I am eighteen! Old enough to be Queen. You are not old, Lord M.”</em>
</p><p>
  <em>And there it is, he feels it again, his age deep in his bones. She looks at him with unguarded eyes, and tonight, of all nights, with a fist of years-old pain closing in tight around his heart, he means his next words with nearly all that he is.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>“If only that were true.”</em>
</p><p>
  <em>~</em>
</p><p>
  <em>It is too late, he thinks, to warn her to be careful. She is well and truly drunk now, and there is an awkward moment with Flora Hastings that cannot be ignored.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>In the hallway she laughs like the girl she is, and he says “I’m afraid you’re tired, Ma’am. Perhaps you should retire.”</em>
</p><p>
  <em>“I don’t want to retire! I want to dance with you!”</em>
</p><p>
  <em>And all of a sudden, she is too close. Close enough that if anyone wandered into this hallway, it could bring her disaster.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Close enough that his thoughts scatter for a moment and his breath catches in his chest, because she has pulled him to her, and she cannot do this. They cannot do this. Her tiny hands on him, her earnestness showing in her eyes because the champagne has taken her good sense from her and left her with nothing but drunken honesty, and perhaps he should have listened when Conroy told him to stay away, except he could not have because then she would have been left all alone. He swallows against it. Swallows back hard against the entire, wretched day and night, looks her in the eyes, and tells her “Not tonight, Ma’am.”</em>
</p><p>
  <em>There is a moment that seems to stretch on forever. A moment during which his feet forget to feel the floor and his lungs forget to inhale the air. A moment his eyes spend locked on hers and hers on his, and oh, he is a bloody fool. A stupid, bloody fool who has realized too late that he has allowed himself to become attached to a too-young girl who can never give him anything in return.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>No matter that she looks at him with her heart in her wide eyes. She is drunk, he tells himself. She will not remember any of this tomorrow, and if he is any sort of friend to her at all, he will never allow this to happen again. He sees it begin to set in, the realization. Watches as she begins to understand through a haze of alcohol and youthful excitement that boundaries which are never permissible to be crossed have been, just now. He watches the hurt of his refusal bloom across her face and holding himself back from her, he feels, quite suddenly, as though he is about to be very ill.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Too late. A great many things, he sees now, have occurred to him too late.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>She walks away, and there is a pained relief. He is left alone, and this night always ends in self-recrimination; most certainly in grief. He has no excuse for being caught off-guard.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>But he is. He knows now what he has refused to see for all these months that have passed between them, every day spent at her side. He has been shown in a deserted hallway that he has drifted too close. She has been the light at the end of a very long and dark tunnel, and he has relied on her brightness entirely too much and only just been reminded that she will never be his to keep.<br/></em>
</p><p>
  <em>Fondness. Enchantment at the antics of a girl-Queen. Protectiveness of her innocence. Oh, he would give nearly everything he owns if he could force it to remain just that, but he knows it will not. He knows himself to be slipping already, and knows that saving himself is already beyond his ability. It is only a matter of time, now, and of watching her grow.<br/></em>
</p><p>
  <em>All he can do is try to forget.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>~</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Her coronation comes and goes.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>She spends almost the entirety of it terrified that she will faint, her heart pounds with such force against her chest. But Lord M smiles at her and calls her regal when all is said and done, so she thinks she must have played her part reasonably well, at the very least.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>After the coronation comes Lady Flora, and a great many unpleasant things that she will acknowledge, later, she never would have survived were it not for Lord M.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>As it is, she does survive. But only, she knows, because he carries her through it. Because he uses his clever words to fight her battles for her.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>She is grateful, and he is kind in spite of all her failures.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>~</em>
</p><p>
  <em>He knows her to be one of the tiniest women of his acquaintance, but he has never seen her look so small as she does on that piano bench, her shoulders hunched around her as though to hide her from the world.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>“Good morning, Ma’am. Come, there are three regiments waiting, I believe.”</em>
</p><p>
  <em>But she is paralyzed, and yes, he knows. He has seen the cruel sketches and he remembers all-too well what it feels like to have one’s name and unkind likeness smeared across the headline of every newspaper in the country.</em>
</p><p><em>He gives in. He has remained by her side in the weeks since the ball, but he has also kept his distance. He has been so careful to stay close and yet kept her at arm’s length, but he knows what it is to be unable to move for the guilt of failure. He remembers it well. </em> <em>He remembers, in fact, a great many things too well, he thinks. He remembers her wide, revealing eyes, and he knows that he cannot allow this to break her; that he is unwilling to stand back and leave her alone to cry.</em></p><p>
  <em>So he sits too close to her and he tells her too much. Tells her of Augustus, of his little boy who died. He tells her that he knows what it is to grieve and mourn, to suffer publicly and never be allowed a moment to break.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>“The funny thing is, I don’t think I was ever happier than on those nights I was sitting there, feeling my little boy drift off.”</em>
</p><p>
  <em>It takes him hearing the words--his own words about his boy--to realize that he is telling her things he has never told anyone before. Everyone he might tell witnessed it all first hand, and now he sits here, and he is trusting her with the softest, tenderest parts of himself, this girl who is such a marvel, and yet who remains so stubborn and impulsive. So naive.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>He finds, even more startlingly, that though she is everything young and impulsive, he never once feels the urge to hold back and protect himself from her. On the contrary, the telling of it, the giving it to her, feels like a heavy weight being lifted from his shoulders at long last. An indescribable relief, and why is it that helping her always leads to healing for him?</em>
</p><p>
  <em>“When he died, I felt there was no point to my existence.”</em>
</p><p>
  <em>The truth.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>“Lord M, how can you say that?”</em>
</p><p>
  <em>“I no longer feel that way, Ma’am.”</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Also the truth, though he knows very well that it should not be. That she should not have been his salvation.<br/></em>
</p><p>
  <em>He tells her to try. To find a reason--any reason--to continue. He says “You must go out, and you must smile. You must smile, and wave, and never let them know how hard it is to bear.”</em>
</p><p>
  <em>He tells her that she, slowly and very nearly without his notice, has become his reason.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>And she listens.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>~</em>
</p><p>
  <em>She never does tell him that he is her reason. That instead of soldiering on for her people, or her crown, or even her own pride, she chooses to ride forward that day and to lift her head because anything less, she knows, will be unworthy of his speech to her. Of the lesson he has just cut himself open to teach her. He has no idea, not even the vaguest inkling that day, that he has won her loyalty forever. He cannot know that now, when she thinks of bravery, she will imagine Lord M holding his little boy’s hand in the dark, keeping all of the monsters at bay.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>He will, perhaps, never know that the day they share a piano bench is the day she decides that there must be nothing in the whole world worse than disappointing him, and that to do so would surely be the one thing she could never bear. Not when he believes in her so.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>It is the one thing she vows never to allow herself to do.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>~</em>
</p><p>He sees Victoria again at dinner and, of course, Lord Melbourne.</p><p><em>Does the man never leave her? </em>He is the Prime Minister of one of the world’s greatest governments. Surely he has more important things to do than to make idle chatter with the Queen’s courtiers and to watch the Queen feed her lapdog more food than the children on her streets will eat tonight.</p><p>But it seems Lord Melbourne must have very nearly nothing else to do, because Victoria goes on and on about all the time the two have spent together managing her army in all the comfort she surrounds herself with, while he spent his day in the cold watching children beg for bread. If this is how her Prime Minister spends his days, Albert thinks the man has never had a serious thought about anything in his life. Indeed, he speaks of his parliament as though it is all some silly, English game, and Albert thinks Victoria must be blind. She takes her advice from him, from her <em>Lord M, </em>and the man has taught her, too, to be serious about nothing. She cares only to pet her dog and play her card games, and Melbourne encourages her. </p><p>He does not like it here, in this palace with these people. He cannot laugh with them at jokes he does not understand, or coo at lapdogs, or be English enough to make himself pleasing to Victoria. It does not matter how beautifully she can play Schubert, or that her small hands are lovely as she does, or that perhaps he allows his fingers to brush against hers more than is strictly necessary, just to see if her skin is as warm as the candlelight makes it look. If she does not care to discipline herself to play scales, she will never learn to be better.</p><p>If she does not care to discipline herself to be serious and see the truth, she will be a Queen who is never remembered for being great.</p><p>~</p><p>
  <em>She recovers from Flora Hastings well, he thinks.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Better still, she learns from it. Learns to think before she speaks; before she acts. He can see it in her audiences and even in the way she speaks to him.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>And he is proud of her. He is proud and...cautious. He, too, has learned many things in the time since her ascension. Things about himself, about how her eyes have the ability to arrest his from across a crowded room if he is not careful. About how her fears inspire his tenderness, and how difficult it is to keep it restrained. He keeps the knowledge tucked down deep inside of him. She need never know, and neither should anybody else. He, alone, may ever be party to his own foolishness. Now is the time to put it aside and focus on stabilizing her reign. </em>
</p><p>
  <em>The people have yet to forgive her, though. The English have long memories, he knows, and he desires nothing more than a few calm months during which she can regain their trust.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>But then the Jamaica Bill happens, and a great many things go awry.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>~</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Resigning is perhaps the most difficult thing he has done in recent years.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>His feet feel like lead as he walks through the palace halls. He already knows what she will say. Can already hear it in her voice, and he has no desire to hear it in reality.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>But he does, he must, and the look he finds in her eyes, in her face, in most clear. She thinks he has betrayed her in this. Believes that he has let her down unforgivably, and perhaps he has but this is the way of Prime Ministers, coming and going. He knows that, and if he has let her down, it is in that he has not prepared her better for this moment.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>“Do you really mean to forsake me?”</em>
</p><p>
  <em>And he has never in his life been more truthful when he tells her that he has no choice. Never, because how can she imagine that he wants to leave her? That he can have spent over a year of being in her presence near-constantly and leave now without a regret? That he will not miss her bitterly; her lessons, and her ambitious walks, and her rides that end in being rained on more often than not? That he will not always wish there had been just one more box for them to complete together? A little more time for him to teach her?</em>
</p><p><em>He will do all of these things and more, though if she does not already know, then he certainly cannot tell her. She will surely follow him back to Brocket Hall in his memories. He will never be free of her, and he knows--has known for months now--that he has been an irredeemable fool for allowing her to take root in his chest and grow there. </em> <em>Nevermind that she is just a girl yet and entirely too young, she is a Queen.<br/></em></p><p>
  <em>And yet, he does not believe, even if given the chance, that he could ever bear to do things differently. It seems that a part of her, in fact, belongs in his chest inspiring his protectiveness, making it an enormous effort for him to resist the urge to look back at her as he leaves the palace.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>As he leaves her behind and knows that tomorrow he will be lonely for her, and that for the first time in all their acquaintance it will no longer be his privilege to stand by her side.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>~</em>
</p><p>
  <em>She cannot remember the last time she cried so.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>The tears seem as though they will never end, but only because the loneliness never ends. He never comes back, she never looks out the window and knows that she can expect his carriage to roll up the drive, she faces her duties alone now, and she is frightened.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>She feels so terribly small, like a little girl named Drina locked up in Kensington again.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>And she hears them whisper. Hears them all, Mama, Sir John, Uncle Cumberland, say that she is perhaps going mad. Only this time, there is no one to defend her.</em>
</p><p>~</p><p>Victoria is impossible.</p><p>He soon learns that three hours with Lord Melbourne is a brief meeting by her standards, and what is it they <em>do</em> all day? She cannot have that many papers, and not for the first time, Albert finds himself wondering how the Prime Minister can justify spending so much time away from his own work, even if it is supposedly in service to the Queen. When they are not meeting privately, Lord Melbourne is often accompanying her on walks or to receptions, and she must invite him to dine every night, because he seems to be a permanent presence at Victoria’s table.</p><p>He wonders at this fool’s errand Uncle Leopold has sent him on. There are scarcely hours enough left in her day for him to speak with her without Melbourne’s hovering. Indeed, he begins to wonder if she speaks often to anyone but Melbourne and her ladies. She seems to spend more time with her lapdog than with her own mother. He has seen the way she treats her mama with derision, and when he tries to be kind, she berates him.</p><p>“I didn’t take you for a flatterer,” she tells him as they walk, and he wants to tell her that he is no flatterer—<em>that</em> is her Lord Melbourne’s method—but he does not, because she is, of course, correct when she says he knows nothing about it. Nothing about Victoria and her mama, and he supposes, if the hurt expression she wears is to be believed, that there may well be a reason Victoria snubs her the way she does.</p><p>He, of all people, should know. Papa—</p><p>But it does not matter. He has made a wrong step, it seems. Victoria is <em>impossible</em> and he cannot find his rhythm with her. It is like trying to waltz without music, and he knows he is doing it all wrong.</p><p>He can tell, because she spends the rest of their walk together with a crease in her brow that he cannot work out how to smooth.</p><p>~</p><p>
  <em>They make a mess of things.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>She is stubborn, he knows, but he does not expect the resistance she shows to the change in governments.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Perhaps he should have. She never does give up when she believes herself to be in the right.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>He certainly does not expect her to turn up at Dover House in all its cluttered glory, so obviously without the touch of a woman to make it presentable for her, and catch him unawares in a similar state.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>“Your Majesty! Forgive my disarray. I-I was not expecting visitors.”</em>
</p><p>
  <em>“Evidently.”</em>
</p><p>
  <em>And she smiles as though he, in his disordered house and not in a fit state to receive a beggar off the street, let alone the Queen, is the most delightful thing she has seen in days.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>When did he begin to think of them as profound, her smiles? When, he wonders as he seats her and waits for her to tell him what can have possibly brought her here, did he begin to measure his successes and failures by them?</em>
</p><p>
  <em>He cannot say, but she is here now and she cannot be, no matter that she seems delighted by the situation. He will not have her reputation tarnished in the papers because of him, and she cannot stay for long because then she will grow to be in the habit of visiting him, and the final separation that must come soon will only be all the lonelier for her.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>For them both.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>And Peel, she tells him; of course. She does not want him, and he should have taken greater care to guard her against this. Against her dangerously noticeable fondness for himself. He can treasure their meetings and delight in nearly everything about her all he likes, but he will always scoff and call himself a fool bent only on hurting himself at the end of the day.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>She is, perhaps, too young to do the same, because for every step he attempts to take away from her, if only to keep her safe, she insists on coming two steps closer.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>However, it will soon no longer matter. She cannot have her own way.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>“Do you imagine that I want to leave you, Ma’am?” </em>
</p><p>
  <em>With her wide eyes that accuse him of forfeiting his place at her side too easily, he thinks she must. </em>
</p><p>
  <em>“There’s something more important here than my feelings, or even yours. You are the Queen of the greatest nation of Earth--one that elects its government and abides by the rule of law. Now, I don’t believe in much, as you know, but I do believe in the British Constitution, in all its tattered glory, and nothing, not even my devotion to you, will stop me from upholding it.”</em>
</p><p>
  <em>And he believes in her. Believes that she can do this without him. Believes that she must, and that when put to the test, she will rise to the challenge.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>He has seen her do it before.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>He cannot bear to soothe his own foolish longing for more time with her at the expense of her reputation. At the expense of holding her back from what she was born to.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>“Peel’s not such a bad fellow, really,” he tells her. “Just remember, if he suggests anything that you don’t like the sound of, just ask him for a little time to consider. When in doubt, always delay.”</em>
</p><p>
  <em>She is every bit equal to this, he knows. She tries and she learns. She has listened to him and heeded him for over a year now, and he has always known that there would come a time to watch her take his lessons and walk away to use them as her own.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>She may be young, but she will soon be ready. If they part now, he will have every faith in her abilities. He need not--cannot--remain by her side to watch her and admire her progress. To enjoy her delightful company.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>But she is so frustratingly persistent, and at least when she asks him to stay, to dine, and must ask why he will not, she can claim the foolishness of youth, unlike him.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>“I think if you are not my Prime Minister, you are still my friend?”</em>
</p><p>
  <em>And no, he cannot. He cannot, because it is like the coronation ball a second time. Too close. She has come too close, and what is more, he has let her. Damn the fool that he is, he delights in her too much sometimes to notice when she has strayed entirely too near.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>“I think you must know why.”</em>
</p><p>
  <em>But in the end, he is not certain that even if she knows, she cares at all. He knows her by now, and he knows that she has not yet finished with this by the look in her eyes and the steel in her tone. Her ladies will be a point of contention, and he expects to be declining not a few invitations to the palace in the near future.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>But she will learn, eventually, even without him to guide her.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>She must.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>~</em>
</p><p>
  <em>She does not learn.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>He tries to warn Peel, tries to tell him not to treat her like a lord in the House, but the man will not listen, and so Melbourne is, in fact, in the House when Peel announces that the young Queen has blocked his ministry using the skirts of her ladies in waiting as barricades.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>He is...alarmed. Is she really so frightened of him leaving her as all that? He knows he will have to upbraid her for irresponsibility and foolhardy stubbornness, because in fighting to keep him she has endangered herself and caused upheaval to the state.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>They argue. They yell, in fact, and she reprimands him for the first time in their acquaintance.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>And she is so, impossibly stubborn.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>He knows that  she is frightened, yes. He knows her better than to assume she is causing a scene for the sake of her own pride. She truly does not believe she can manage without him, and he realizes that perhaps he has asked too much of her too soon, but it cannot be helped. She must rise to this and he cannot help her.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>He wishes, for what must be the hundredth time, that he did not care. That he could look at her and see only another unreasonable sovereign, but he cannot. </em>
</p><p>
  <em>So he does the only thing left to him and takes his leave of her.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>She must know—she must—the difference between duty and inclination. </em>
</p><p>
  <em>Inclination...hers or his.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>~</em>
</p><p>
  <em>He will most likely never know what it is she has told Wellington, but he imagines it must have been truly extraordinary for the old Tory to all but instruct him to take up his ministry again.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>She has been, he can admit to himself now, most admirably brave. He cannot think that Conroy has been at all pleasant to her these past days, he knows that her Uncle has been scheming behind her back, and she has refused to be cowed by the intimidating Tory figurehead he is well aware that the combination of Wellington and Peel together cuts.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Perhaps most impressively of all, she has borne the pressures he himself has placed on her. Pressures to let him go and to return, once more and without allies, to the solitude of court. He knows Peel well enough to be reasonably certain that, sturdy, reliable fellow though he may be, he will never be a true friend to her.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>He has, he thinks, asked more of her than is entirely reasonable. And he supposes that her willingness to disobey even his own orders regarding her ladies and his ministry is sign enough that, though he may fail each and every day to withhold himself from her as he ought, she is not wholly compromised by the easy closeness--the familiarity that often goes inadvisably unchecked--he cannot seem to deny to either one of them.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>The choice is quite simple, really, in the end. He cannot allow the absurdity of the rumors of her madness to stand. That, and he finds, uncomfortably, that he cares for her too much to let her go on so unhappily.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>When she proves herself too short to pull the curtain from her portrait, all he can feel is protectiveness. He can feel the men laughing at her, finding only amusement in the little girl rumored to be mad, and he is helpless to be anything but gentle as he steps forward to help her.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Being as harsh with her as he has been the past several days has gone against every instinct he possesses. He can only say that he has done it with her best interests in mind, and that now that it has become clear that he must return, he will gratefully leave it all behind in favor of being her Lord M once more.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>She is not the only one who has passed recent days longing for their old familiarity.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>“If you do me the honor of asking me to form a ministry, Ma’am, I would accept.”</em>
</p><p>
  <em>So young, and with such responsibilities. She should not have to bear them alone, and he will not leave her to. Not anymore.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>So he retakes his place with her for now. She is such a loyal creature, the Queen, but unbeknownst to her, she has always possessed his utmost devotion in return. He will let nothing keep him from her side now that she has made him see that she still needs him; he will remain for as long as she does.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>For whatever time is left before one thing or another truly does force him away.</em>
</p><p>~</p><p>The English are so frivolous. He does not care to play card games, or to make silly jokes, or to dance English dances he hardly knows.</p><p>Victoria need not throw a ball for him.</p><p>But she does, and before Victoria even arrives in the ballroom he can feel both Ernest and Uncle staring at him, expecting him to ask her to dance.</p><p>He knows very well that his arms around her are the last thing she wants. But then she does arrive and he forgets, for a moment, that he does not entirely like her, nor she him. He does not see the gown she wears or the diamonds in her hair. Not even the polite smile she wears as people bow to welcome her.</p><p>He sees only her flowers.</p><p>And then the dancing has begun, she is in Ernest’s arms and he does see her. He sees the gown, and the diamonds, and the smile. He hears her laugh. He watches as Ernest <em>makes</em> her laugh, and he thinks that even if they are as ill-suited as it is possible for two people to be, even if she thinks him ridiculous and he thinks her irresponsible, she is still lovely. She still seems to sparkle in the candlelight. He cannot deny it.</p><p>
  <em>And she wears those flowers.</em>
</p><p>If he thought she might welcome it, if he had any hope of it ending in anything but more terse words, he would ask her to dance.</p><p>
  <em>He would like nothing more.</em>
</p><p>But Victoria, he thinks, would rather dance with Lord Melbourne. She prefers his company above all others, after all. He knows she does, because when she has finished with Ernest and begins to catch her breath, Melbourne is there, and she takes both of his hands into her small ones with a smile that is unlike any she has given either he or Ernest since they arrived. She smiles at them politely, because she is English and people have surely been telling her to smile prettily since childhood.</p><p>She smiles at her Lord Melbourne as though he has caught the moon and made a gift of it to her. No matter that the Prime Minister should know better and she should too, she will surely reserve her waltzes for him.</p><p>But Ernest will never give him any peace if he stays here. He cannot hear what they are saying, Victoria and Melbourne, but if he goes now and asks her to dance, he knows she will turn that polite smile on him again and tell him she has already promised it to her <em>Lord M.</em></p><p>So he goes. At least this way she will refuse him and they will not have a chance to argue.</p><p>Except she does not.</p><p>Something strange is happening to Melbourne’s eyes, he thinks, as the man looks at her. Something that transforms him from a politician into something else entirely that is unrecognizable to Albert, and he wonders if Victoria’s eyes are doing the same as she returns the stare, her back to him. Then Melbourne’s eyes meet his over her shoulder, and they widen very slightly. “Ma’am,” he hears Melbourne say as the man inclines his head to tell her to look.</p><p>Albert is offering his arm to her before she has even turned. “May I have the pleasure,” he asks, already planning to retire early and escape the stares of everybody in the ballroom once she refuses him, but then she is facing him and he is shaken, because yes, her eyes <em>are</em> doing the same thing. <em>The flowers,</em> he thinks. It must be the flowers, because for the sharpest, brightest moment he looks at Victoria and sees only his mother. Only her terrible sadness, and it is staring at him from out of Victoria’s eyes as though he is seeing his mama <em>now</em>. He remembers it so well from all the nights she held him close. He remembers her weeping when she thought he was already asleep.</p><p>As fast as he sees it, it is gone. Victoria has blinked and the sorrow has vanished from her like it never existed.</p><p>
  <em>Like he saw the flowers and dreamt for a heartbeat that it was Mama. And the dream, if that is what it was, has left him breathless.</em>
</p><p>She places her small hand in his, and they waltz.</p><p>~</p><p>
  <em>She does a great deal of growing up in the year following the bedchamber crisis.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>He watches as she softens, as the last physical traces of girlhood fade from her like a setting sun. She is undeniably lovely and always has been, but if she was a burning fire before, she is slowly transforming into a steady, glowing warmth, and it suits her. At some point, he thinks, she has ceased to be a girl, and has started to become a woman, and the suitors begin to descent on her in earnest; first the Russian Grand Duke, who can have no hope whatsoever but makes a nuisance of himself regardless, then her Cousin George.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>She is more responsible. She is so grateful for his return that he feels a silent grief for her, that she should carry such fears of both past and future that she requires him by her side to soothe them. It is certainly no burden to him. He meant it when he told her it would be his greatest pleasure to serve her. She is, as ever, far dearer to him than she should be. But she is young, and he wishes she did not already have such scars. Regardless, her gratitude has prompted a renewed vigor for their lessons, and many pleasant hours are passed in her study with her boxes open before them, government business and the education of a Queen becoming one in the same.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>They fall easily into their old familiarity once more, and his presence at the palace is, again, a near-constant.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>He maneuvers Conroy.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Once, he arrives at the palace in the morning and instead of finding her happily strolling the halls, finds her closeted up in a seldom-used sitting room with Conroy’s hand in a tight grip around her wrist. He has no wish to know whatever it is the beast is hissing at her, but instead closes the door behind himself very loudly and tells Sir John that his presence is required by the Duchess.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Immediately.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>After that, he is careful to always keep some nuisance in Conroy’s periphery. He may not have the authority to dismiss anyone from the Queen’s household, but he can keep the man busy enough that he has little time to devote to anything else, including intimidating the Queen.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>She opens Parliament and does so beautifully. Not even her Uncle Cumberland succeeds in putting her off, though it is his own personal opinion that she is correct in assuming that to be his intention.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Leopold visits, and the Chartists stage an uprising. Rather more suddenly than he would have liked, she is surrounded by people with questionable intentions at best, and he is concerned. Her safety is never a guarantee, though he does everything within his power to ensure it. She cannot even dedicate a memorial to her father without a riot breaking out, and of course, he may be a blind fool for her, but the same does not hold true of him for the King of the Belgians.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>He knows very well that her uncle has brought a proposal of marriage with him.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>~</em>
</p><p>
  <em>She feels so much stronger now.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Strangely, in the days since Lord M’s resignation and return, she has grown to be not quite as dependent on him as she was before, she believes. Somehow, in surviving the Duke of Wellington, Sir Robert, and indeed, even Lord M himself, she has learned that she is, perhaps, more capable than she at first believed. But no matter, she has him back now, and the relief is palpable. Even breathing comes more easily when he is near. Her days seem fuller when he is in them, and when he is not she misses his smiles and laughter, his quick quips and clever explanations, his excellently told stories more than she can ever say. But most of all, she misses the warm comfort having him close by always brings her. She always feels so safe when he is near. When she knows he is watching her. Whenever he leaves, the palace always feels a little colder and she finds herself counting the hours till his return.</em>
</p><p>~</p><p>
  <em>Leopold tries to put him off.</em>
</p><p><em>He attends her at the opera because what she asks of him is so little; to accompany her and provide himself as a ready friend and ally, a companion devoted to her comfort and hers alone, should the need arise, is much more a privilege than a chore. </em> <em>He does doubt that her uncle much appreciates his presence, though, and as he watches her smile with the flirtatious Grand Duke and roll her eyes at her pompous cousin George, burning so brightly that both men pale pitifully in comparison, he thinks that she is entirely too spirited to be a Queen.</em></p><p>
  <em>He admires that in her very much. More, perhaps, than he should.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>In the aftermath of the riot, there are words. It seems Leopold is not a blind fool either. He is expecting the push for the Queen to make a match with her German cousin. He is only grateful that the Queen is not here and voicing her frustration at her uncle’s words. A riot is more than enough to manage on its own, without an incensed young woman on his hands. She will have to marry one day, he knows very well, and then most everything will change and she will look to her husband--not to him--and he will miss her so very much. He thinks that she might not like to hear such a thing from her uncle Leopold though, and the old king can bluster at him all he likes; he has surely heard far worse. The criticisms of the turbulency of the Queen’s reign are nothing new, nor are the pointed remarks about his age. </em>
</p><p>
  <em>What he says about the Queen, however—“I have seen the way my niece looks at you.”—that gives him pause.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Those words do what he has not allowed public opinion or the jibes of opponents in the house to do for years. They follow him home and keep him up at night. They make him uneasy.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>They fix his thoughts on her.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Leopold is, no doubt, mistaken. What nonsense, when the Queen is daily surrounded by a host of handsome young princes in possession of both ample charm and the motivation to use it.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Regardless of whatever folly has left him so ill-advisedly attached to the sovereign of his country, he has never encouraged her beyond friendship. She is, of course, overfond of him; that much is true enough and obvious for all to see, but surely it has not gone so far as all that, has it? Or is he simply an oblivious fool toward her in every particular?</em>
</p><p>
  <em>That is, admittedly, not out of the question.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>She grows in grace and loveliness with each day; it is impossible not to notice, though essential to do so without response. She is blossoming, thriving even, in her reign, and she has always been infectious to him. Irresistible in a way that he suffers silently, for he finds that stopping it is beyond his powers of control.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>She is loyal to him to a fault, attached to his presence and commands much of his attention, he will admit, but anything more?</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Surely not. Surely she is only a young woman seeking the comfort of a friend and ally. Seeking the assurance of the familiarity of someone she trusts to take her side when things go awry.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Nevertheless, he leaves for Brocket Hall the next morning. He needs to think somewhere that is not accessible to King Leopold, and she can manage without him for a few days.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>After all, he will not be far.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>~</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Uncle Leopold has, by all accounts, unsurprisingly come here to bully her into marrying Cousin Albert.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>She will not obey him, she already knows. It is, after all, a ludicrous suggestion. Uncle Leopold is persistent, though, and to her ears he sounds like a second Sir John, come to torment her with his constant demands and chastisements with Mama at his side.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>He is in earnest, she thinks, and though she forces herself to be so quietly, she is a little afraid.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>She has no patience for it, none at all, and when he begins to make suggestions about Lord M, she really has finished with the subject entirely.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Except, it would seem, she has not. She lies awake now in her bed, and he is all she can think of, Lord M. His eyes on her at the opera with the constancy she has learned to expect from him. His footfalls always beside her and a little heavier than her own. His hand warm on her back in a crowd, or at the riot, a silent guide and assurance. He is...always kindness itself. He always has time to be caring and gentle with her. Always has time to explain things with the utmost patience. </em>
</p><p>
  <em>There is no foolishness, it seems, that he has yet to forgive her for.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>While she finds herself seeking to be clever to earn his smiles, it always seems to come so naturally to him. She has, perhaps, never smiled and laughed so much in her entire life as she has with him. Not even when she was a little girl.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>She cannot bear it when he goes away.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>There is always something of a mystery to him, caught up in the weariness that sometimes follows him or in the gentle melancholy of his eyes. She has seen it for what seems an age, yet she has never been able to put her finger on it, aside from the certainty that it must stem from his late wife and son.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>She remembers meeting him that first day. Remembers thinking him strange and unworthy of her trust, and she marvels that he has become so much a part of her that, while she more than likely can, she has no desire to manage without him at all. It becomes easier to smile the moment he enters any room, and, she thinks, at the root of it all is that nobody else in all her life has ever made her feel safe before. As though she is not required to fashion herself into something she is not, because what she already is might, in fact, be enough.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>No one but him.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>What more, she wonders, could she want for in all the world?</em>
</p><p>
  <em>~</em>
</p><p>She does not smile as they find the count of the music, but that is alright. He would rather have her honesty than her manners.</p><p>Victoria’s honesty, it seems, is that she looks very fine tonight, with her jewels and her flowers, that she dances just as well as she plays the piano, and that when doing so, she becomes a woman of few words.</p><p>“You dance beautifully,” she eventually says softly, and yes, she is right. He has no wish to be vain, but for the first time since leaving Schloss Rosenau, he feels at home in his own body and as though he has, at last, regained his rhythm.</p><p>And somehow, smoothed her brow.</p><p>
  <em>If only she would wear flowers every day.</em>
</p><p>And so he tells her.</p><p>She might laugh, he warns himself before he begins. He reminds himself that she giggles like a schoolgirl and might think him ridiculous for being so captivated by a blossom and a few memories of his mama, but the shadow that hung over her eyes when he asked her to dance tells him that she will not. That she must know enough, somehow, of losing what is precious to her to understand what it is he means. They have found a little connection, a little <em>zusammenhang </em>at last, and even if she still does not like him and he still does not understand her, he thinks they can at least share this.</p><p>“Forgive me…your corsage—” <em>He cannot tear his eyes from it, fascinated, and he almost feels as though he is being indecent, but she just holds his gaze and listens. </em>“My mother always used to come and kiss me goodnight before she went to parties. She would always wear those flowers in her hair.”</p><p>He watches her pause, watches her hear and understand what he has said, and the sorrow from before, he did not imagine it because it has returned. He is not so vain to think he has inspired such a thing in her with a little story, but he cannot imagine what has brought on such grief. His memories of his mother’s tears are from her last days with them, and he knows how she suffered.</p><p>
  <em>What, he wonders, has pained Victoria’s heart so?</em>
</p><p>She takes a very deep breath as though deciding something fatal and steeling her courage to act it out, and then the flowers are no longer at her breast but in her hand as she says very quietly “Then you must have this,” and she offers them to him. “To remind you of your mother.”</p><p><em>Victoria.</em> </p><p>The knife is in his hand before he can think, and when she sees it she draws back sharply. Her whole manner has changed. As soon as the flowers are in his hand she seems to shrink back from the candles, the music, from <em>him. </em>He can see in her face, though he does not know what has changed so suddenly, that she would rather be almost anywhere else than here, waltzing with him.</p><p>He still makes the cut in his shirt; still tucks her flowers away close to his chest. He thinks that now, when he smells their scent, he will think not only of Mama, but of Victoria and how she was so very sad all night and that he will always wonder why.</p><p>He realizes, suddenly, that the music has faded into silence. That the couples dancing around them have stopped and are applauding the players, and it happens so suddenly that he cannot stop it. It is too strange, too reflexive, and if she were to ask him just then why he does it, he would not know what to tell her.</p><p>He glances over her shoulder, and his eyes meet Lord Melbourne’s.</p><p>He cannot read the expression on the older man’s face, but he can confidently say that whatever Melbourne is, his expression is not pleased, as almost everyone else’s is. <em>Everyone else’s except Victoria’s</em>. He wonders what it is about them both, Victoria and her Lord Melbourne, that make them so incomprehensible to him, for he understands neither of them and fears he never truly will. Perhaps it is that they are English, or perhaps it is that wherever Victoria is, Melbourne’s gaze is never far behind, and she always seems to understand the words he holds there as though the man has spoken them into her ear.</p><p>Albert is angry at himself for allowing his eyes to stray from Victoria. Angry that, though he is not quite certain why, something in him knows that he has just crossed her Prime Minister.</p><p>Angry that he fears the man’s hold on her enough for his eyes to be drawn to his face. For heat to rise into his cheeks once more. He is Prince Albert. Uncle Leopold has summoned him here for this express purpose, and yet he suddenly feels an out-of-place twinge of guilt, as though he has been caught trespassing on another man's property.</p><p><em>What a foolish thought,</em> he tells himself. Victoria belongs to no one just yet, not even to him, and she most certainly will never belong to Lord Melbourne, no matter how pleasant she finds his manners.</p><p>She nods to him and walks away without a word.</p><p>~</p><p>
  <em>The air in Hatfield is surprisingly brisk, she thinks as she walks the long garden path to where he is. It is a strange place, Brocket Hall, caught somewhere between eerie and charming, and she does not know what to make of it until she sees him at the end of the path and it no longer matters.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>“Oh, it is you, Ma’am. I couldn’t tell.”</em>
</p><p>
  <em>It is peculiar, now, seeing him after Uncle Leopold’s lecture. After lying awake in bed until either very late or very early and learning to look at him with new, opened eyes. She can now see what has always been in plain view: that she cares for him and, she thinks, he for her. That he has known her innermost thoughts and feelings with an inexplicable ease since the very first, and that she has given him her unreserved trust in a manner unprecedented in the whole span of her life.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>That she still, after all this time, does not know how she will ever bear it if he ever truly walks away and leaves her all alone.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>He is too much to her; so much a part of her that she now finds it almost shocking to see him here, in the mist of Brocket Hall, undone and at once so completely foreign to the Lord M who attends her in London, and yet as familiar as though she has spent the entirety of her life in this very garden with him. Over the most recent years of her life he has somehow managed to be father, teacher, friend and protector to her all at once, and now she wonders if he will not be willing to try his hand at one more role.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>If he will be for her that one thing remaining. That one thing that will allow him to stay by her side forever.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>He has the most magnificent gift, she thinks, for soothing the hidden, anxious parts of her with only a smile and a few kind words. He does so now, telling her all about his parliament of rooks and looking, in the odd light of the courtyard and with the breeze in his hair, as though he has come to her from another world. And, she thinks, why not? He has certainly come to her rescue enough times to grant him the title of hero. Her constant knight.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>He has, in a very strange way, raised her. She thinks back to the girl she was when he first knelt before her at Kensington and hardly recognizes her now.  He has brought her up in a way no one else--not Mama or even Lehzen--ever has, and she is very nearly breathless at the thought that she has been so oblivious for so long.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Is there any part of her that remains untouched by him? She cannot think of it, if there is.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>She can feel her heart beating in her chest now, running away with her, and she does not want to say it, very nearly invents some question about the Chartists, or Uncle Leopold, or the usual affairs of state to explain her presence in his garden, so far away from the palace, but she finds that she has to know.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>So she asks and he...answers.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>He takes her hands, which are chilled from the cold, into his warm ones and says “Did you know that rooks mate for life?” and it is like sitting with him on a piano bench once more. She watches, and before her very eyes he teaches her a lesson she will never forget.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>He teaches her not of a crown now and the burdens that come with it, but of marriage. There are some things, she realizes as he tells her of his own, dead wife with such a terrible sadness in his eyes, in his voice, of which he knows intimately, and which she cannot understand at all. The civilities, as he so beautifully tells her, that make a marriage sparkle.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>What she does understand, however, are his rooks. Their nests. Oh, she knows exactly. The gentle pull toward another soul, the warmth and comfort that comes from being together. The desire for nothing more in the world than to remain at their side.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>The ferocity of loyalty and simple, constant longing for a little more.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>She knows.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>She bites back her fear and offers him her heart, but he tells her that he has no use for it and she tries to remember how to breathe. She never expected—it never occurred to her that—</em>
</p><p>
  <em>How can she have been expected to brace herself, she wonders, for a pain she has never before known to exist? She has built a nest for him right at the center of her heart without even being aware of his presence there. She has come to love—yes, to love him, she realizes, while being, at the same time, so terribly blinded to it.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>She bites back words that will surely beg him to reconsider. Words that will, no doubt, tell him that if he turns her away, there will be nothing left for her. There will remain nowhere else for her to go. That she has found herself mated to him for life without her knowledge or consent, and thinks that she has been, all unknowing, ever since he first called her Queen Victoria and meant it. That she has offered herself—all of herself with a vulnerability she never knew she could possess—to him, and she cannot now take herself back.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>She refuses herself the weakness of saying any of these things.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Instead she takes her leave of him and walks quietly away.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>~</em>
</p><p>
  <em>He spends a long time with the rooks after she leaves, and he…</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Has lost himself, without a hope that he will ever return.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>He has been a damned fool, he knows now. She is not a girl anymore, he knows very well, but a woman, and in his care for her, in his desire to help her and make her way smooth, to have just a little more time with her and to bring that singular light to her eyes each day, he has failed to take the precautions required for a young woman’s heart.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>And now they are here and there are only two things that remain to him. Rooks and lies.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>He uses them to lie to her, his rooks. Uses them to tell her that he does not care and never has, and he laughs bitterly at himself now because despite his best efforts to deny it, he finds that nothing could be further from the truth. He has only himself to blame—he knows better. She should too, but can be forgiven if she does not, for youth and innocence are great clouders of judgement.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>He has neither for an excuse.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>He has watched over her, has cared for her quietly for the better part of three years, has never been more than a step behind her, and now they have come to this. He can hide himself from her, he knows; has already done so with pretty words about Caro and birds. What he cannot do is reach inside of her to tear whatever part of himself that has gotten caught up in her heart out of her. He knows the Queen—knows that she is a loyal creature to the bitter end. She will, just as he has told her, one day give her heart wholly and without reservation, and the man who receives it will be the most fortunate to ever live, but if she thinks she loves him, or if she loves him in truth, God forbid, she will never let him go. He can love her silently—and yes, he can say that he loves her now that it has come out into the open and there is no more sense in hiding it—for as long as he is allowed to be by her side and after, too, but he already knows what it is to love without hope. He has loved a boy who was always going to die, and in his own way, a woman who always preferred another.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>She is the Queen. She does not know what it is to love something she cannot have, and he has hurt her terribly, he knows, in order to teach her. In a hopeless attempt to shock her into indifference or perhaps even dislike that he already knows has and will fail. She is not to be told what to do, the Queen. He loves the stubborn streak in her dearly, even as he laments its presence near-daily. In another life, in another place and with fewer years between them, her heart would be the most precious gift he could ever receive. </em>
</p><p>
  <em>It is still the most precious gift he could ever receive, but he cannot change his own lot, though he is weary with it, and he has no desire to change hers, though he would love her still if she were not the Queen. All the soft parts of her are his constant fascination, her cleverness, her quick humor, the anxiousness that is sometimes allowed to get the better of her. She is impulsive, too tender-hearted, and yet the very qualities that make her reign difficult are the very ones that have drawn him too close.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>He asks himself, with a throbbing pain in his temples, how he will face her when he returns. How he will look her in the eyes knowing that he has broken a part of her with a lie meant to keep her from harm. He remembers when he tried to resign. Remembers the fear in her eyes and the desperation she used to fight him. He will have to distance himself now, and he cannot bear to think of her in such a state again. Not when he can help it. </em>
</p><p>
  <em>She does not deserve to be lied to, even for her own good. She has never deserved anything less than the absolute truth. Not only does he owe it to her, he wants to tell her. He wants to fix the damage he knows he has just done. There is a way, he thinks, to be tender with her and yet firm.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Not only does he have a responsibility to keep his Queen from scandal, he has a responsibility to her that is wholly separate from the crown, and he knows that he has failed in it today. A responsibility to the girl who insisted upon thinking for herself at Kensington. Who struggled bitterly through the first year of her reign, and who came out on the other end triumphant. The girl he loves to know and talk to. The girl who has heeded him past reason and who has been to him one of the most precious joys of his life.</em>
</p><p><em>He has a responsibility, now, after all this time spent by her side, to be more than just a Prime Minister to her. She calls him her friend. She calls him...calls him her love, which only proves his failure. His stupidity is his own, </em>must<em> be his own. If he wishes to leave himself wounded and hurting because he has been unable to keep his heart from her, so be it, but she cannot be made to pay the price.</em></p><p>
  <em>Yes, he has a responsibility to be exactly what she has called him.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>He has both a responsibility and the very highest of privileges to be her Lord M.</em>
</p><p>~</p><p>
  <em>She very nearly turns the flowers away.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>She weeps during the carriage ride back to London; cries bitter tears and wonders what she will do in the days to come, with Uncle Leopold and Mama hovering and constantly demanding that she send for Cousin Albert.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>With Lord M sure to call on her at the palace, as he always does. What is she to do now, when he kneels before her to kiss her hand? She knows now that he has never been, and will never be wholly hers. Not as she has been wholly his since he sat with her on a piano bench and told her of how he loved his poor little boy.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>She does not want a stupid boy like Albert, or anyone else. It has always been Lord M or nothing at all, though she has not realized it until now. He is the only one she trusts, the only one she truly cares for, so it seems she will simply be alone.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Like Elizabeth.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>She has not yet changed when the flowers arrive. Skerrett is with her though, readying her, and when the footman arrives saying “With Lord Melbourne’s compliments,” she very nearly tells him that he can return whatever has been sent to her to Lord Melbourne straight away.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>She will not have his pity and she has never tolerated being patronized. Not even Lord M is an exception. She does still expect him to be different; to be better.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>But when she sees what he has sent her, delicate little blossoms of lovely white, she allows them to stay. She has never received such a gift before; something so small and utterly lacking in value, yet so…</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Intimate. Why should he give her flowers now, of all times? She cannot fathom for what purpose he has sent them. They make her uncomfortable from their place on her dresser, and by the time Skerrett has finished with her she is pointedly ignoring them and pondering her future life; how it will resemble that of the Queen she impersonates tonight.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Then Emma comes and Victoria….</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Learns.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Like sitting on a piano bench, alone this time. She learns that her costume, her Elizabeth, though Emma says it is splendid, is rather less of a triumph than it was intended to be.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>She learns that the flowers are orchids and that they are stunning to Emma as well.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>She learns that Lord M no longer tends his glasshouses. That he closed them after his wife died, and yes, she thinks, that is like him. That sounds very like the man who told her about rooks and their nests, and then about his dead wife. He has apparently opened them again, though as she tells Emma, he cannot have done so for her.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>“Do you know how hard it is to grow orchids? You misjudge him, Ma’am.” But Emma is surely wrong. She has been to see Lord M herself; has thrown caution to the wind and spoken only the truth, and he has refused her. What Emma says cannot be so.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>“He cares only for the memory of his wife.”</em>
</p><p>
  <em>And Emma’s smile is one of the gentlest things Victoria has ever seen, aside from Lord M’s eyes.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Then she is alone and her mind is racing too quickly for her to keep up. She is all the way back at Kensington and he is kneeling before her. She is too young and too small at her first Privy council and he is helping her. She has been so dreadfully foolish about Lady Flora and he is rescuing her. She has fought the Tories for him tooth and nail and he is returning to her.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>She is standing beneath the nests of his rooks, entrusting the most guarded contents of her heart to him, and he is looking at her so tragically, is whispering to her so beautifully. He is perhaps—most uncharacteristically—if Emma, who was sent to her, in fact, by Lord M, is at all to be believed…</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Lying to her.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Her heart is sore and her mind grows very quiet indeed.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>(Is that what he told you? Then that is what he wants you to believe.)</em>
</p><p>~</p><p>They go to Windsor.</p><p>It is a relief, he feels, as their carriage leaves the last of London’s buildings behind. As much as he treasures the galleries and inventions of the city, it has been too long since he has breathed fresh air and found himself alone amongst the trees.</p><p>He only wishes he could be surprised when Lord Melbourne follows Victoria all the way from London. Wishes he could be surprised that she has <em>invited </em>him all the way from London.</p><p>He has a sprig of rapidly drying flowers that reminds him, despite his best efforts, of the look Melbourne wore after Albert placed them within his shirt. The look Victoria wore as she gave them to him, as though the sun had shined its final day just as their waltz came to a close.</p><p>Any shadows that might have remained leave her the minute she arrives to find her Lord Melbourne waiting for her, and though she is beside Albert almost all evening, he finds her eyes straying to the corner where her Prime Minister has made himself comfortable often.</p><p>Lord Melbourne, he thinks bitterly, who has probably never contradicted her in his life. Who has insulted the very crown she wears by making himself charming and agreeable to her just to gain her favor. Surely this man has never told her the truth about herself, has never once denied her anything, and now she is attached to the lies he tells her because they are pretty, empty words that have never required her to learn or improve herself. Can she not see that her precious Melbourne has done her no favors by allowing her to remain ignorant all this time; by never showing her how to be a true Queen instead of just a woman who likes to wear her crown?</p><p>Melbourne, who does not care to hear the truth from him; who does not care to learn about the suffering that goes on under his government, so long as it does not affect him.</p><p>
  <em>Melbourne, who is a scoundrel. If Victoria knew even the half of it—</em>
</p><p>Melbourne, who watches her always, even more closely than she watches him. Albert has passed hardly a single moment with Victoria absent Lord Melbourne’s supervision, and he wonders, truly, what the man is looking for.</p><p>But it does not matter, because when morning comes, Albert is riding, racing down a forest path with lovely Victoria at the end of it, and Lord Melbourne is nowhere in sight.</p><p>~</p><p>
  <em>For one single heartbeat, she wants to say no.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>She wants to tell him that he presumes too much now, after everything. That she will certainly not dance with him. </em>
</p><p>
  <em>Except she is wearing his flowers, and she supposes that must be for a reason.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>“I think this one is free.”</em>
</p><p>
  <em>How does he always do it, what he is doing now? How does he always look at her and know just which words will soothe? Which words will calm her and make her feel—</em>
</p><p><em>Well, a few days ago she might have said loved. </em> <em>Now she does not know what to think. Had not thought, at the beginning of the night, to dance with him and yet here she is.</em></p><p>
  <em>Elizabeth and Leicester.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Oh, he tells her and her heart begins to skip entire beats in her chest. She remembers the keen grief of him as he told her of his rooks, remembers “Do you know how hard it is to grow orchids,” and she looks into his eyes and realizes with stunning, stupefying clarity, that Emma was right.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>She would be gasping under the weight of it, she thinks, if only she could still breathe. That same grief is there again, in his eyes, and she realizes now that when he looks at her, he is mourning her. Mourning her loss because he is Lord M, of course he will never allow her to do such a reckless, foolhardy thing.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>She knows him well enough to feel the truth of it in her very bones—that he has been selfless for her. That regardless of his own feelings, he has tried to let her go.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>That he will lie to her to accomplish it. Except just this once, in costume and with secret flowers and rooks, he has chosen to tell her the truth.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>That the rooks that nest at Brocket Hall really do mate for life.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>That Leicester and Elizabeth never did find a way to be together. They were, after all, not in a position to marry.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Whatever their inclination.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>She never knew that it was possible to love something—someone—as much as she loves him now, in this moment. Her Lord M is...incandescent, though he cannot know it. He has poured himself into her from the very first, is glowing inside of her even now, and she knows that he will never go away, no matter how much distance he insists upon.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>She ages during that dance. She can feel herself grow years and years in the span of only a few seconds, can feel herself transform from a little girl called Drina into something else entirely because she understands now, if only a little. That foreign sadness? It is hers now, and she thinks she knows what it is to hold oneself back from a beloved simply to keep them from coming to harm.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>She will be stronger, she vows. She will listen to what he tells her and she will obey, and she will never let him see how hard it is. He has given her so much just now. So much for so long. He has given her eyes to see him with, and she thinks of what she knows of Lord M. That when he loves, it is quietly and completely, and that when he loses it is just the same.</em>
</p><p><em>If what he says is true, then he has chosen to do so again, to suffer it all again, just because of her. Because she has asked him to. </em> <em>She can see it now, the future. She will be Elizabeth, and she will have whatever parts of him he will give to her.</em></p><p>
  <em>And someday they will say goodbye, and she will mourn him for the rest of her life.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>She will not cause a scene. She will never ask for more than he is willing to give. She will allow him to love her in silence, and she will thank him by doing the same. She has given her heart and cannot take it back; has no desire to take it back. But they will always be this—Leicester and Elizabeth.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>The Queen and her Lord M.</em>
</p><p>~</p><p>He wonders if he will find it again; that soft, tender thing deep in her eyes that so drew him to her as they waltzed. Perhaps this time her softness will not be accompanied by her pain, and perhaps, as they did with the story of his mother last night, they will find something to share in these woods, and she will finally smile at him in truth.</p><p>They run. She tells him there is a tree in these woods that has been here since the Norman conquest and they set out to search for it, but for once Albert is not as interested in the history of his surroundings as he is in understanding the woman beside him, picking up her skirts and giggling at her little dog.</p><p>And she does smile, a little. She comes unbound, and she allows him closer than is decent in a crowded ballroom. She even teases him, and for one moment he thinks she is being serious; thinks she is so English and so much a Queen in her palace that she does not understand what it is to run free and <em>breathe. </em>But then she smiles again and says “Albert, I am <em>teasing</em> you,” and he can only think her too strange, this girl who does not particularly favor him and who seems to go from devastated to laughing within the space of a second.</p><p>He cannot understand her, but here, in the sunlight, with her hair blowing about her face and her little smiles finally directed at him, he does not mind.</p><p>
  <em>She is lovely.</em>
</p><p>And then there is a whimper and she is frowning, and all of a sudden she is running again and calling out “Dash! <em>Dash!” </em>and he, too, must run to catch her.</p><p>When they find the little dog, he is trapped and bloody, licking a broken leg and whimpering, and though the wound is simple enough to bind, Victoria is near tears.</p><p>“I know my attachment may seem foolish,” she says as she watches him tie his shirtsleeve around Dash’s leg, “but when I was living at Kensington, Dash was my only real friend.” And there, <em>there</em> is the truth. It is, perhaps, the first time he has heard her speak and known from just the sound of her voice that she is being sincere.</p><p>His breath gusts out in relief. He had begun to wonder if she knew how to do anything <em>but</em> hide behind quiet, polite little smiles.</p><p>“But now it is different?”</p><p>She looks up at him and seems almost…<em>startled.</em> As though she has realized what she has been saying until now. “Yes,” she says as though it should be obvious. “I have Lord Melbourne now, and my ladies, of course,” and the few words are more insulting than all the hours she has spent alone with Lord Melbourne put together, because in this moment he knows she is <em>honest.</em> When asked about her friends, her answer, in truth, begins with Lord Melbourne.</p><p>“I wish you had not been so much with Lord Melbourne. He is not serious.” The man has no decency. If he did, he would leave her side occasionally and allow her to be the Queen instead of his plaything.</p><p>Instead he has attached himself to her so much that she rushes to his defense. “He does not choose to appear serious—it is the English manner—but Albert…he is a man of <em>great </em>feeling.”</p><p>It is too much after all this time. After Lord Melbourne’s comments about government, after meeting his eyes over her shoulder at the ball. The man has unlimited access to her every day. She has allowed a reprobate into her closest confidence, and he will not have it. If Melbourne will not tell her the truth, then he must. He cares for her too much—already, after so few days and so many sharp words, but she is lovely and intelligent, and he still has her flowers—to do anything else.</p><p>He stands.</p><p>“Do you know how many poor people live in <em>your</em> city? There are children selling matchsticks to earn their supper! Your Lord Melbourne chooses not to look at such things, but <em>I</em> must. We cannot close our eyes to the world around us, Victoria. Lord Melbourne chooses to surround himself with sycophants, and what is worse, he has surrounded you with them too!”</p><p>She is standing now too, staring at him with wide eyes and a set jaw, and she frowns at him so, shaking her head as she says "You don't know him at <em>all," </em>and his blood boils for how Melbourne has ingratiated himself to her. Perhaps she is angry with him for speaking the truth, but he does not care. He will not <em>flatter</em> her as Melbourne does to gain her favor, nor will he paint a pretty picture for her of what is unquestionably ugly. “Your Lord Melbourne is a scoundrel who has attached himself to you like a barnacle. He is <em>always </em>watching you and he gives you nothing but empty flattery to earn your favor. You should not favor him so—all the scandals alone make him a wretch, let alone his politics—but if you <em>want</em> to be lied to, then perhaps you should marry—</p><p>
  <em>Crack!</em>
</p><p>He is stunned for a moment, disoriented, and when his eyes clear he can see that she is too.</p><p>Shocked.</p><p>Her palm is flushed red from the force of her blow. He can feel the print of it on his face and there are tears on her cheeks.</p><p>Her lip wobbles and her chest heaves as they stand there in ringing silence, and when she finally speaks, her voice is low and trembling.</p><p>“Do not <em>ever</em> speak to me of Lord Melbourne again. Do you hear me?”</p><p>Her voice cracks on Melbourne’s name. Her face crumples and her eyes squeeze shut, and all of a sudden he knows. It makes <em>sense. </em>She’s—</p><p>“Are you in love with him?” he asks, his voice cracking into a hoarse whisper before he can stop it, because there is a difference between foolish favor—between fascination, or enthrallment, or even affection—and <em>love. </em>As soon as he says the words, he hopes she will not answer.</p><p>There is no need. He already knows the truth. It is so very obvious, how has he been so stupid? Lord Melbourne is not merely often with Victoria, he is <em>always </em>with her. He is not watchful of her, his gaze is constantly <em>riveted </em>to her. He does not simply offer her government counsel, he offers her <em>himself</em>. Albert has never seen a man so attentive to a woman’s every need and desire. He has watched her Prime Minister pay her more courtesy than most women receive from their husbands in a lifetime, and he has been in England for only a matter of days.</p><p>
  <em>He has been so frustrated and so enamored with her, it has made his mind dull and his eyes blind. </em>
</p><p>But she just shakes her head and whispers “Not ever again, Albert. Not <em>ever.”</em></p><p>“Because he is in love with you.” He knows he is correct as soon as he says it. He has dried flowers that remind him of it, though the evidence does not make the truth any less ridiculous.</p><p><em>“Don’t,”</em> she moans, and he can only stare as she so clearly fights to master herself; fights to stem her tears and steady her voice.</p><p>He cannot stay here, cannot be out here alone with her and her tears any longer, so he bends to pick up Dash but she rushes to his side and will not let him.</p><p>“I can do it.”</p><p><em>“I </em>will,” he says sharply. “It is a long way back.”</p><p>“No, <em>I </em>will,” she insists. He is <em>mine.”</em></p><p>Her dearest friend. Just like her Lord M.</p><p>So he lets her. They have to walk back because Victoria cannot ride and carry her dog at the same time. He leads the horses while she comforts her Dash, and by the time they finally arrive, the sun it setting.</p><p>They are almost to the castle, almost reunited with the others when she reaches out a small arm and stops him.</p><p>“Albert—” she begins, and her eyes are so round and red that he wonders what her courtiers will think happened when she rejoins them. “Albert, it is not what you think.”</p><p>He wants to shout at her, wants to ask her how she can expect him to think it could be anything but what he already <em>knows</em> it to be, but she goes on.</p><p>“There is—there is nothing between us, Lord Melbourne and I. There never has been, and there never will be.” And then she will no longer meet his eyes. Instead she fiddles with her dog’s collar, and her next words are so quiet, he might have missed them had the wind blown at the wrong moment.</p><p>
  <em>“He is too honorable for there to be.”</em>
</p><p>And he sucks in a breath. Her words can mean only that there is most definitely something between them, and that the man who has been in every newspaper across Europe, featured in stories of indecency, and seduction, and adultery, has, against all belief, kept an exceptionally devoted and loyal Victoria at arm’s length.</p><p>His mind rebels against it. He does not want to believe it. <em>He has already fallen half in love with her himself. He wants to thrash Melbourne—too old for her, too disreputable, too facetious—for taking what has never been his to take.</em></p><p>But she wept half the way back to the castle, and he cannot believe her to be false after hearing her tiny hiccups. After watching her coo softly at her dog. She may love Lord Melbourne, and Lord Melbourne most <em>certainly</em> loves her, but it seems the man is no fool.</p><p>“It is none of my concern,” he tells her, and from the look on her face, she believes it no more than he does. Uncle Leopold <em>will</em> see them married if Victoria will have him at all, and he has made it his concern now that he has accused her and received no denial. They both know he has only said it because he can think of nothing else to say.</p><p>He wonders, for a moment, if she will demand his silence; if she will make some threat to force him to keep her secret, but she does not. She merely carries Dash inside and is met with a chorus of dismayed exclamations, and he follows. They are all there, Ernest, Uncle Leopold, her mama, her ladies. <em>Her Lord M. </em>All of them, and he can only imagine what they must think. Victoria’s face is clearly swollen from crying, he is missing a shirtsleeve, and he can still feel the heat of the mark she left glowing on his cheek.</p><p>Then there is Dash.</p><p>But she just passes the dog to her open-mouthed equerry and tells him to find someone who will fix his leg. Then she pushes past all of them, all their wide eyes and shocked faces, even Lord Melbourne’s, and disappears into the castle.</p><p>He can only do the same.</p><p>~</p><p>
  <em>She cries many tears in the days following the ball, though she allows him to see very few, if any of them.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Still, he sees enough. Enough to notice her preoccupation with Elizabeth. Enough to comment on it.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Enough, it seems, to tell her that Uncle Leopold has no intention of allowing her to reign alone.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>“Albert and Ernest are coming? But I have not asked them!”</em>
</p><p>
  <em>“Nevertheless, they are coming.”</em>
</p><p>
  <em>And time seems to race, as though every second that slips away till their arrival has become indescribably precious.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Why is no one in all the world content to allow her to remain happy as she is?</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Not even Lord M, who reminds her once again of what she has no wish to think about for the considerable future.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>That he will not always be by her side; will not always be so near.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>That Leicester was never allowed to remain with Elizabeth forever.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>“Don’t say that, Lord M.”</em>
</p><p>
  <em>“But I must. Let the Coburgs come. Perhaps Prince Albert will surprise you.”</em>
</p><p>
  <em>But she cannot bear for things to change. Not now. </em>
</p><p>
  <em>Not yet.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>He is wrong when he says she will not be happy alone. She will, perhaps, not be as happy as she would have been if he were not the Prime Minister and if she were not the Queen, but alone will be better, she thinks, than locked away with a husband she will never be able to love.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>“There is no one I care for,” she tells him, and he only smiles his sad little smile. The one that is terribly fond of rooks.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>“I do not think you have really looked.”</em>
</p><p>
  <em>She is always so wretchedly selfish with him, she knows. She always demands too much of him, and now he sits before her trying to convince her to marry another man, and his orchids are pressed between the pages of one of her books.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>He was happy too. It is not just her own loss. She must be braver than this. For him. Because he has always been so brave for her.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Smile, she thinks to herself as her throat closes and her eyes begin to ache. You must smile and wave.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>And so she does.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>“Well, I’m not going to get married just to please you.”</em>
</p><p>
  <em>She has learned so many lessons from him in the years that he has been everything to her from father, to advisor, to the greatest affection of her heart. The lesson she will, perhaps, need most in the coming weeks is that sometimes the most selfless way to love someone is by lying to them.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>“No,” he laughs softly, his eyes full of fond wistfulness. “You must please yourself.”</em>
</p><p>
  <em>She will never let him know how hard it is to bear.</em>
</p><p>~</p><p>He visits Parliament.</p><p>And Lord Melbourne.</p><p>The Prime Minister speaks of many things, but Albert finds that after all his anticipation to see the place where tyranny was banished, he cannot concentrate after all.</p><p>All he sees when he looks to his guide, to Melbourne, is the man Victoria—lovely, difficult, stubborn Victoria who he thinks, after seeing her care for her injured dog and being given her flowers to remind him of his own mama, must also be very kind—loves.</p><p>He speaks of retiring, Melbourne, and Albert thinks privately that Victoria will never allow it. Lord Melbourne will be a part of her court for a very long time, and Albert does not know what to think about that, so he chooses not to.</p><p>Later, he sees Victoria.</p><p>They have not spoken since Windsor, and when they are left alone in a small library he has never seen before, they both seem to sigh.</p><p>“Thank you,” she says at last.</p><p>“For what?”</p><p>“For not saying anything,” she replies, and he wonders who she thinks of as she says it. He could have told any number of people; her mama, Uncle Leopold. <em>Lord Melbourne.</em></p><p>He thinks he can guess exactly who she imagines him having words with, and for what must be the hundredth time, he wonders what passed between the two of them before he ever stepped foot in England.</p><p>He will never ask, because he does not truly wish to know.</p><p>She proposes marriage to him.</p><p>It is not romantic. She does not smile, nor does he, and he wants so much to ask her who she does this for. Only days ago, he would have said Uncle Leopold and never questioned it, but he cannot forget her words. They still echo in his mind.</p><p>
  <em>There is nothing between us. He is too honorable for there to be.</em>
</p><p>And he wonders, but he does not ask it.</p><p>He asks another question instead. He says “What about…” and he cannot finish it.</p><p>
  <em>He does not want to be the husband of a wayward wife, but Uncle Leopold will have his way. Besides, he thinks he has already lost part of his heart to her already, somewhere between a piano duet and a slap on the cheek.<br/></em>
</p><p>She closes her eyes and shakes her head. “I will get better with time,” she says, but he does not miss the waver in her voice, nor does he fail to notice the way she steels herself before adding “I <em>must.”</em></p><p>He is not certain if he believes her; is not certain if she believes <em>herself,</em> but when they leave the library they are engaged.</p><p>Early in the morning he watches Lord Melbourne arrive, and he sees her walk down the hall to meet him.</p><p>
  <em>At least he knows what they will speak of today.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>~</em>
</p><p>
  <em>He watches as she tempers herself in the scant days between the ball and the arrival of the Coburgs.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>She is very quiet and her smiles are few, but unlike after her visit to Brocket Hall, he thinks now that she will recover. That she will learn to let him go and look to the future instead of over her shoulder to what could have been.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>He still attends her at the palace.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>The boxes come every day without fail, and she summons him likewise. He has her full attention now, he knows, if ever there was a time he did not. She is fixed on him, and he wonders if she is trying to learn as much as possible before he must inevitably leave her to younger, Tory hands. He wants to tell her that it is not necessary. That she is more capable than she knows, and that if she will just trust herself, if she will just follow her instincts and take good advice, she will have no choice but to succeed.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>And he will have no choice but to watch her from afar with constant pride.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>He does, in fact, tell her that, and what does it matter if he neglects to add that he will remember her always as the precious, bittersweet joy afforded to him after he has passed the prime of his life, perpetually within in his grasp and yet not his to take, and that the ache of her will never leave him so long as his is alive, if it makes her smile? But if she wants final lessons he will give them to her, and so he teaches her as much as he is able to in the hours they spend poring over her dispatches and walking the palace halls.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>As the Prime Minister, he is notified immediately when the princes arrive in England.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>He is at the palace when they are presented to the Queen.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>There are very few nights like this one remaining, he thinks as she plays the piano and they all listen. Few nights of invitations, few nights of enjoying her company. Of being allowed to watch over her and make her smile.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>And there they are. Young, handsome, and bold. It can only be Prince Albert who turns the final page of music for her. He knows nearly nothing of the young prince, other than that he is Leopold’s candidate for the Queen’s hand, and that the Queen did not take to him the last time they met. Now, seeing him, he wishes he knew more. He wishes he could have some way of knowing that only kind words will ever pass between the Prince and the Queen. That the boy will only ever touch her softly and speak to her gently. That he will only ever love her whole-heartedly. Leopold insists the boy is the Queen’s match in every way, but Melbourne knows all too well the endless ways a courtship, a marriage, can go wrong. The boy seems so terribly young, and though he will never tell her, so long as the boy behaves, he worries. To leave her, to turn the responsibility of caring for her, and loving her, and keeping her always safe and happy over to another man will be one of the most difficult things he is ever asked to do.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>He hopes more than anything that the Prince will appreciate her.</em>
</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0002"><h2>2. Trennungswalzer (The Separation Waltz)</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Hi guys!</p><p>Not gonna lie, I wrote my tail off to get this published for you guys before finals get going and I'm super proud that I got it done.</p><p>About the title: As many of you probably know, the music Albert and Victoria dance to in Ep. 1x04 is called the Trennungswalzer, or in English, the separation waltz, which is so very on the nose that it isn't even funny. Fun fact: the waltz scene is one of my favorite Vicbourne scenes ever, largely because Lord M looks like he wants to take Albert's knife and stick it through his foot.</p><p>This chapter's pov's include present day (Ep. 1x05) Lord M, Victoria, and Albert, and flashback Lord M and Victoria.</p><p>If you enjoy this chapter, please leave a comment. They really do make my day very bright and they also make me write faster :)</p><p>Love, </p><p>Penny</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Victoria sleeps very poorly the night she becomes engaged.</p><p>Her dreams are blurred, fragmented things, always shifting. There is a ballroom and she is spinning, <em>spinning</em> in arms that are holding her too tightly.</p><p>There is a forest and she is running, lost in tilting trees that seem to rearrange themselves every time she finally finds her way, and Dash is crying.</p><p>
  <em>There is a footpath at Brocket Hall.</em>
</p><p>She knows this place; knows it like she has lived her life in it and died there too, and she knows what she will find at the end of it. Knows that he will be there.</p><p>But it never does end.</p><p>She walks and she walks, and then she runs but it just seems to grow longer. She can hear them now, the rooks, and if she looks up to the sky she knows she will see them there, but she cannot because she must reach the end.</p><p>Just as she has stopped, just as she begins to feel fear seeping into her and the beauty of her surroundings becomes eeriness instead, she hears his voice as though he is whispering into her ear.</p><p>
  <em>“Did you know that rooks mate for life?"</em>
</p><p>But when she turns around, there is no one there.</p><p>~</p><p>
  <em>Albert is so very tall and handsome.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>He has startled her, has pulled her out of her music so suddenly, and looking up at him, seeing him look down at her, she feels so very little.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Dash is her fearless knight in armor then, baring his teeth at Cousin Albert and allowing her to breathe once more, and the way Albert stares at her is nothing short of unnerving.</em>
</p><p><em>She does not like it. She does not like him and his stiff, rude words.</em> </p><p>
  <em>“I’m sorry if your dog does not recognize me. I, on the other hand, had no difficulty in recognizing you. Although now, I believe, you are playing the piano with fewer mistakes.”</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Fewer mistakes, indeed. She can feel herself beginning to shrink, because he has been here, an unwelcome guest in her home for only a few minutes, and already he makes her feel as though she is a silly child. She does not care if he wants to look at her paintings. He is very welcome to them, but she will not be joining him. Her spine is tingling, reminding her that this is what it feels like to be made small. To be made to feel inadequate.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>She has only just met Albert, but between his look of incredulity at her lacking knowledge of fine art, Uncle Leopold’s insistent stare, and Mama’s incessant fawning, she already feels as though she has been locked inside Kensington once more.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>A tiny pawn in their never-ending game.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>She cannot spend all of tomorrow feeling the same.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>“As to tomorrow, Lord Melbourne and I have a great deal of business to attend to, don’t we, Lord M?”</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Please. Just once more, please. He cannot abandon her now.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>And he does not.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>“Oh yes, Ma’am. The dispatches from Afghanistan will require your complete attention.”</em>
</p><p>
  <em>She has not felt such a wash of gratitude since she stood before her first privy council and he whispered names into her ear, but the relief no longer comes as a surprise.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>He is always there to catch her, just when she feels as though she is about to fall.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>~</em>
</p><p>She has dreaded this moment most of all, and for the first time in what she thinks must be her entire life, she is loath to meet with Lord M. But as he has always done, he comes to her when she calls for him.</p><p>“Forgive me for being a little late, Ma’am. We do not usually meet so early in the morning.”</p><p>
  <em>Lord M. He kneels before her and she cannot bear it.</em>
</p><p>“I’ve brought the latest dispatches from Afghanistan, and there is a list of guests for your next reception you should see.”</p><p>
  <em>She cannot do it. She will not.</em>
</p><p>She must.</p><p>“Thank you, Lord M.” <em>She could stop now. She could take the papers from him and go to look at them at her desk. He would follow her and it would be like always, like every happy day they have spent together. </em>“I must—I must tell you something.”</p><p>He stops and <em>looks </em>at her, and oh, she wishes he would not; wishes, for once, that he would not be quite so attentive to her because she knows that she cannot, in fact, do this while looking into his eyes.</p><p>“Yes?”</p><p>She turns to stare out the window instead, and then the words just seem to spill out of her because surely it will be better to say them all at once and have done with it. “I have asked Prince Albert to marry me, you see, and he has accepted.”</p><p><em>She will not look, </em>she thinks as she waits through his pause, an aching pain growing behind her eyes<em>. She will not, because she cannot hide from him. She never could, but neither can she let him see her now. Not truly.</em></p><p>“Then he is as wise as he is fortunate. Allow me to congratulate you, Ma’am.”</p><p>
  <em>And there. It is done.</em>
</p><p>Then he is drawing away from her, speaking to Uncle Leopold who arrives and kisses her on the cheek, and she is still fixed on the window, staring at the sky.</p><p>Steeling herself to be as perfect as it is possible to be in the coming weeks, because now that she has proposed, now that she has told him and everything has at last begun in earnest, she knows very well that there will no stopping any of it. No stopping the preparations and the congratulations, and no stopping the gradual separation that is inevitable and coming so very quickly, she must force herself to breathe for dread of it.</p><p>
  <em>She hopes very much that she has made him a little proud of her, at least.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>~</em>
</p><p>
  <em>He allows her to hide behind him, though he has no business doing so.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>By all rights, she should be spending tomorrow with her German cousins, with the Prince, but when she turns to him with such wide eyes and begs for his help, though his heart aches with it, he cannot refuse her.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>His desk is piled high with paperwork. He can surely find something to occupy her tomorrow, and if he allows himself a moment of honesty, he will be forced to admit that seeing her in the morning will be a bittersweet privilege he has no desire to turn away.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>The princes are shown to their rooms and the rest of her court, Emma, Leopold, the Duchess, all seem to take their cue from the Coburgs and retire for the night, with the exception of the Queen.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>She stays. He hears her heels clicking against the floor as he watches her return to the piano bench and sit facing him, and he waits. He is very familiar with the picture she makes just now, still as a statue on a piano bench, looking for all the world as though she has lost herself.</em>
</p><p><em>He can think of every reason he should take his leave of her, every reason he has no right to do anything but order his carriage at once and return to his own house, but her shoulders have drooped so and he knows the crease in her brow only from the times he has found her in deepest crisis, alone and afraid.</em> </p><p>
  <em>He will not allow her to be so now.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>“He is so very tall,” she breathes, and he hears what she does not say. That she feels small and afraid, and he aches for her.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>“Yes, Ma’am, but Dash has proved himself taller, I think.”</em>
</p><p>
  <em>She laughs, if only a little, and he is glad. Grateful that he can still make her smile, because she is too young to be so unhappy as he has made her these past weeks. “He is always such a good boy,” she says, and then she is rising and going for the stairs, he behind her, and she pauses on the first step, her back to him.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>“Lord M, I—”</em>
</p><p>
  <em>And she stops. Shakes her head almost imperceptibly. Turns toward him and tells him “I will see you in the morning.”</em>
</p><p>
  <em>He knows very well, knows by her posture and her tone, knows by the way she will not meet his eyes, that it is not what she intended to say.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>“Good night, Ma’am,” he agrees.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>“Good night.”</em>
</p><p>
  <em>~<br/></em>
</p><p>Lord M does not dine with them the night she and Albert announce their news to Mama.</p><p>He has made an empty excuse, she is certain. An excess of documents requiring his attention has never kept him from her before, but she cannot truly be vexed with him.</p><p>She can, at least, spare him from this. She only wishes that she also could be spared. She is in no mood for Mama’s cry of joy and ecstatic kisses laid to both of her cheeks. She is in no mood to smile and Albert—</p><p>Albert is not smiling either, but he is warm to Mama; he is affectionate with her, and Victoria can see a little of the man who told her of his own mama while they waltzed together and who stared at her so strangely and ran his fingers through her hair in a picturesque forest.</p><p>A little of the man that she thinks she could, perhaps, learn to like if Albert would only be him all of the time. But he is not. He is stiff and so often cold, although to be fair, she knows she has given him ample reason to be, of late.</p><p>And he will, of course, be the very reason she is forced to give up what she loves most in the world all too soon. She was wrong before, she realizes, because even if he had come to England and given her only his warmth and affection, had shown her nothing but romance and the most charming manners in the world, she knows deep down to the very heart of her that she never could have learned to like him in spite of <em>that</em>.</p><p>~</p><p>Albert hardly sees Victoria at all before he leaves for Coburg.</p><p>There are a few walks, during which almost nothing is said at all. A few luncheons with her household, and then he is standing with Victoria on the steps of her palace and saying goodbye to her knowing that he will not see her again for several months.</p><p>
  <em>But Lord Melbourne will.</em>
</p><p>Despite the promises she has made to <em>get better,</em> she will meet with her Prime Minister every day of his absence, Albert is certain, and the thought makes his jaw clench.</p><p>But then she is wishing him a safe journey and he is asking her if he may write to her. She is promising that she will reply, and then he is in a carriage and driving away, leaving her, with only a ring on her finger to claim her as his own, to her <em>Lord M’s</em> hands for many, many days and wondering all the while what the two of them will do while he is away.</p><p>~</p><p>He is dismayed and yet not entirely surprised to find that rising from his bed and assuming the task of governing the country has not required so much effort since his boy died.</p><p>Her engagement, it seems, will make everything more difficult. And after, he expects—well, after will be the most trying of all.</p><p>Kneeling before her each day has never before been a chore and is not now, but neither has he ever felt so old and tired while doing it.</p><p>
  <em>Neither has he ever kissed her proffered hand while there was a ring on it.</em>
</p><p>He readies her for the Privy Council. He writes an address for her and practices it with her until she knows it by heart, even though she will inevitably read it. She is always so nervous about speaking before audiences; a dreadful fear for a Queen to have. He remembers how she trembled at her very first one and how impressed he had been then, to watch her soldier on. Now her nerves make her pensive and she protests against appearing before the council at all.</p><p>“Surely, Lord M, it is my <em>choice</em> who I marry?”</p><p>Of course it is, as he tells her, but she must also address the council.</p><p>He knows before she has even finished speaking, knows it before he even writes her address, that it will not be a popular match. Wellington and Peel, they are both up in arms at the idea of another Coburg so near the throne, and it seems Prince Albert will not only be the Queen’s husband, but also a stick with which the Duke will beat at his government.</p><p>The Queen wrings her hands after the council and tells him that the Prince must have a title—an English one—and an allowance. That she wishes her intended to be content in England and so must furnish him with everything a royal consort is entitled to, and he can already <em>feel</em> the exhaustion that the impending fight in the House will bring.</p><p>Nevertheless, he promises to take the bill to Parliament for her and begins to sort out all the many details involved in arranging the Queen of England’s marriage.</p><p>~</p><p>
  <em>They should not be here.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>She sits at her desk, as she has nearly every day of her reign, her box of papers spread before her, while he is stationed only steps away, enjoying the view provided by his favorite of her many windows.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>His favorite, in all likelihood, because just as she has sat at her desk for the duration of the morning hours of nearly every day for the past few years, he has  spent his mornings memorizing the landscape he sees now through the glass as it appears in every season.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>But he should not be here now and neither should she.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>He should be at the House, he knows very well, or behind his desk at Dover House at the very least. Instead, he is attending the Queen who should, by all rights, be attending her cousins. As it happens, she is reading very slowly through every word of each and every document he has brought her concerning Afghanistan, asking questions he is certain she already knows the answers to, and a few he knows she does not. As she turns another page he wonders, idly, if she is making their morning meeting stretch so long because she imagines he will leave her to her own devices the moment they are through.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>He will not.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>He should do exactly that, there is no denying it, but he remembers the look of alarm in her eyes from last night when the Coburgs arrived, and he does not care to see her wear it again. More than that, her cry of frustration at the young prince’s lack of courtesy is still fresh in his mind from this morning, and he has not spent inordinate amounts of time at her side without learning that her ire, when raised, must be allowed to settle in its own time. No amount of quips about Lady Peel will douse it completely, and it will not do, he thinks, to allow Albert to attempt further courtship of her while she is already vexed with him for his clumsiness. </em>
</p><p>
  <em>Young men, he will allow, are often reduced to bumbling imbeciles in the presence of beautiful women, and the woman to his left, currently struggling to pronounce Afghani surnames, is both beautiful beyond rival and a Queen. Far better for her to allow her frustrations to ebb away in his presence than in her cousin’s. She will find it impossible, no matter how great an outpouring of anger she ever summons, to offend him beyond forgiveness; he is all too certain of it. And besides, he must treasure what mornings he has left at this window, answering her questions and hearing her pen scratch against the paper as she signs her name.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>There are so few remaining.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>When her careful and extraordinarily thorough perusal of the documents becomes too much even for the Queen who, as he so wishes to tease her but refrains from doing so for the sake of what he knows to be her frayed nerves, has never before paid such devoted attention to affairs of state before, he chooses to stay and tells her they should take advantage of the mild weather and walk the grounds.</em>
</p><p><em>She has, he knows, never been one to sit still for very long, and when she lets out a happy sigh at the feel of the sun on her face as they exit the palace, he feels the last of his unease at keeping her from her guests fade away.</em> </p><p>~</p><p>She writes to Albert that Lord M will take the matter of a title and allowance to Parliament.</p><p>She writes that she has every faith, always, in Lord M’s abilities to accomplish as much as is possible against the constant hindrance that is the Tory Party.</p><p>She just hopes that Albert believes her.</p><p>~</p><p>The uproar in the House is every bit as bad as he feared it would be. It seems that not even a single MP supports the idea of a German prince to rule over them and their Queen.</p><p>He wishes they would take the time to know her. If they did, they would soon realize that there is not a man alive capable of ruling Queen Victoria. She is not to be told what to do, not to be ordered about. Any obedience she has shown to <em>him</em> through the years has been out of a most uncharacteristic deference on her part, and not at all to be taken for granted.</p><p>He returns to the palace to tell her that Parliament will not give to her Prince what she has asked for, and she frowns and tells him to go back, to fight the Tories again for her because Albert expects more.</p><p>Privately, he thinks there’s no knowing what the Prince, or Leopold, rather, will expect. Only that he is not, under any circumstances, willing to give the boy an allowance generous enough to support three mistresses. Comfortably settled in England the Prince is entitled to be, but the boy will be <em>devoted</em> to his bride; he will make certain of it.</p><p>He still returns to the House at the Queen’s bidding to fight the Tories all over again.</p><p>When he returns to the palace for a second time, weary from the bloodbath, he tells her that he has done all that he can and that he hopes it will be acceptable to the Prince.</p><p>What can the boy want with a title and an allowance anyway, but pride and ease? He will have her for his bride, and she is a far greater prize than all the prince’s purses in England and more besides.</p><p>~</p><p>
  <em>She knows she is behaving badly.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>She knows that hiding herself away will only prevent the inevitable. That even with Lord M to distract her and provide her with excuses to escape Albert’s company, she will not be able to avoid him forever.</em>
</p><p><em>He catches her at dinner, where she is forced to sit at a table with him without any escape.</em> </p><p>
  <em>If she had her own way, it would be Lord M seated at her side, but instead he is half the table away and she is flanked by both of her cousins. Ernest, at least, is agreeable, but Albert sits stiff as a rail in his chair and makes almost no conversation at all, except to inform her that her coronation portrait is lacking by his standards.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>“We went to look at the old masters,” he tells her, as though she must be rebuked for her vanity. As though, were he to be given a crown and a kingdom tomorrow, he would refuse to allow his own portrait to be painted. “There’s a very fine Rubens.”</em>
</p><p><em>If Lord M were closer he would say something clever and smooth the rude words away. She has seen him do it a thousand times before, and at this very table, but she has been deprived of her champion tonight in favor of a boy who seems intent on making her wretched. She wonders how he would feel if she told him he already accomplished his goal before even arriving in England.</em> </p><p><em>“I don’t care for Rubens at all,” she says instead, because she does not have Lord M’s easy gift with words, and because it is true. She does not care for Rubens and she does not care for Albert’s manners, or indeed, for Albert.</em> </p><p>
  <em>Later he reminds her, Lord M. The tired set in his shoulders and the resigned look in his eyes when she forgets that she should be inviting Albert to play cards with her instead of Lord M shakes her from her frustration and reminds her that she is once again being selfish. That if this sort of behavior is her idea of smiling and not letting him see her pain, she is failing him badly. She suspects that not one of her guests can see Lord M’s preoccupation as he joins her table and Albert does not, but she can, and it shames her a little. He sent her orchids and taught her about rooks, about Elizabeth and her Leicester, and she remembers his words well; she has been changed by them and can never go back.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>She is not in a position to be selfish, whatever her inclination.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>So when Ernest insists, she braves Albert’s stiff neck and rude words, and she plays Schubert with him.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>He does, in fact, play very well, but she has never in her life played scales every day, and she thinks that no matter what she does, she will never be good enough to please him. He thinks her a child, and she wonders as she tries to sleep that night if she really is somehow lacking. If she really is as silly and careless as he thinks.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>She does not know, but she cannot help remembering how sad Lord M looked as they danced together, orchids decorating her dress and a costly confession between them, acknowledged but unspoken.</em>
</p><p><em>If she has been careless, if she has been a self-centered child, it is in that she has not taken more care with dear Lord M in all the time he has been everything to her without a single complaint. She has loved him selfishly and without a thought in her head for all the lessons of duty and courage he has ever taught her.</em> </p><p>
  <em>And he…he has loved her too, but Lord M, she knows, has always been selfless while she has cared only for her own happiness. He will always do his duty to her before he will pursue any of his own desires, but his duty to her as he has always seen it, she finally understands after rooks, and orchids, and a great deal of contemplation on Elizabeth, has always been to give her up and watch her walk away.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>~</em>
</p><p>Victoria writes that her Lord Melbourne has taken the matter of his title and allowance to Parliament and failed to get much more than half as much for him as Uncle Leopold was given years ago.</p><p>Uncle in incensed, saying that the English cannot expect the husband of their Queen to exist as a beggar at her feet, and Albert both anticipates and dreads his return to England in equal measure.</p><p>He will always be the poor relation now. His wife will be the Queen of England, and he will be the younger son from a German Duchy that no one cares for. He dreads it, but he also wants to be back in London so that he can be close enough to touch her again; he wants to wake by her side every morning smelling the scent of flowers and knowing that she—beautiful, stubborn Victoria—is his wife.</p><p>She writes that she is sorry for it, sorry that his allowance is so small and that there is no title at all, but that her Lord Melbourne took the matter to Parliament twice and did as much as he was able, and Albert wonders as he reads her words.</p><p>Albert cannot help but think that if Victoria’s Lord Melbourne loved her a little less, he might have fought to give him an allowance and title more.</p><p>~</p><p>“No title and only thirty-thousand a year? Lord M, Uncle Leopold was given almost <em>twice</em> that.”</p><p>She cannot imagine what Albert must be thinking in Coburg. Probably that he will have no money, no title, and a wife he has no reason to trust. She has wanted so many times, in the days since they ventured into the Windsor forest alone, to take back the strike she laid to his cheek.</p><p>Now she wishes it more than ever.</p><p>His accusations against Lord M had been so shocking though—a reminder that perhaps nobody on the entirety of God’s earth could have an idea of Lord M’s care as she has had in the years since becoming Queen. Albert had called Lord M a barnacle, a scoundrel even, and all Victoria had been able to think of were all the times he had turned her away at such great personal cost.</p><p>All to keep her from scandal or harm.</p><p>She wishes now that she possessed Lord M’s way with words. Then she could have told Albert the same thing Lord M has said countless times to her. That to know the difference between duty and inclination is second almost to nothing in importance, and that all decisions regarding the Crown must come from a place of duty above all else.</p><p>Instead she'd hit him, and now Albert will never think of either her or Lord M—the Prime Minister of the country that will be his home—the same way again. She has irreparably damaged Lord M’s reputation in Albert’s mind, and she expects Albert blames the both of them, her and Lord M, for such a paltry offering from Parliament.</p><p>Now she sits with Lord M discussing Parliament’s lack of enthusiasm for Albert and wonders why on earth being German is such a sin in the eyes of the English people. She herself is German, yet Parliament no longer torments her so constantly as they did before.</p><p>Lord M, she supposes, has seen to that.</p><p>“Well, unfortunately your uncle Leopold did not spend that money with discretion,” he tells her, and she thinks that he looks so very tired. Weary, even.</p><p>Worn out. He has worn himself out for her, fighting for Albert and for her wedding. She remembers how harassed he looked returning from Parliament after proposing the bill about the title and allowance the first time, and yet she had sent him back.</p><p>For Albert’s sake. So that she could have <em>something</em> to offer him on his return from Coburg since she cannot give him her heart.</p><p>“What do you mean?”</p><p>“Well, I believe…that there is an <em>actress,</em> Ma’am, whose household is…paid for by your uncle.”</p><p>Oh. <em>Oh. </em>She can feel her cheeks heating with a blush and can do nothing to stop it as she says “That is shocking.”</p><p>And it is. <em>An actress. Uncle Leopold. </em>Quite suddenly she thinks of Albert and wonders if he, once he has grown tired of arguing with her and waiting for her to be serious all of the time as he thinks she should be, once he grows tired of waiting for her to <em>love him,</em> will be like Uncle Leopold and find himself an actress to keep company with.</p><p>She wonders what it would be like to be the wife of such a man. A man who would be unfaithful to his wife. She finds that she cares little enough for what Albert does with his heart, but that she cannot bear the thought of the humiliation it would bring. What would it feel like, she wonders, to be so insulted? How would she bear it?</p><p>
  <em>Lord M knows.</em>
</p><p>The thought sneaks up on her before she even realizes it is forming, and she is so very grateful to be sipping tea as it does because she fears very much that were she not, she would have simply blurted it out between them and embarrassed them both.</p><p>It is a strange thought though, and a persistent one. She thinks seldomly enough of the wife Lord M once had, the wife he must have once <em>loved</em>, but now the faceless woman has been brought to the very forefront of Victoria’s mind and she cannot banish the thought of her.</p><p>She remembers asking him about her once before, his wife, and never quite receiving an answer.</p><p><em>Perhaps you are too young to understand, </em>he’d told her, and he had looked so very sad. She remembers him speaking of his wife at Brocket Hall, speaking of marriage in a way she had not then and does not now understand, and she wants very badly, for one mad moment, to ask him what it was like when his wife—when his <em>Caroline—</em>ran away with Lord Byron. Perhaps if he told her, then she would know whether she will be able to bear it or not if Albert does such a thing.</p><p>But of course, she cannot ask him. The very thought of it is mortifying after all that has happened between them in the past weeks and months, and perhaps she really is as mad as her Uncle Cumberland says to even <em>consider</em> doing such a thing.</p><p>But still, she wonders.</p><p>~</p><p>Albert’s days in Coburg are long and seemingly empty after the abundance of things to pass his time with in England.</p><p>He writes to Victoria regularly and she always replies, but her letters are so proper, so <em>English,</em> that they are almost more frustrating than no letters at all. She tells him, in response to the many questions that Uncle Leopold forces him to include in his letters to her about what allowance he <em>is</em> to have, that her English Parliament needs to be coaxed, rather than commanded, and he can hear Lord Melbourne’s voice in her words as clearly as if her Prime Minister were sitting in the Rosenau beside him. He wonders if this will be his future—Melbourne standing constantly between him and his wife, and it makes him grit his teeth.</p><p>Still, he will take his letters from Victoria and be glad, because Uncle Leopold <em>will</em> have a wedding in a few months’ time, and something strange in Albert misses the infuriating stubbornness of her.</p><p>He imagines their honeymoon. Imagines taking her away from all the chaos of London and just <em>being</em> with her. He remembers Windsor before Dash was hurt and everything that followed, and he longs to try to find that with her again. To try to find the smiles she gave him in the woods. To try to find whatever it was that made her stand still for him and allow him to touch her long, unbound hair.</p><p>He thinks of his mother more often than he has in years, and late at night he holds Victoria’s dried gardenias in his hands and wonders what Mama would think of it all. Of him, and Victoria, and her Lord M.</p><p>And then he tries not to think of his mama at all because deep inside of himself, he already knows exactly what she would think.</p><p>~</p><p>She asks Mama, and instead of being reassured, she learns about her own, dear papa.</p><p>She is so afraid because she is not strong like Lord M. She cannot bear to be thought of as small and insignificant, and who will think her anything else if Albert does the same as Uncle Leopold and <em>Papa</em> and takes a mistress of his own?</p><p>She does not know what to do.</p><p>~</p><p>
  <em>She spends an afternoon with Albert because Lord M coaxes her.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>She dreads spending time with her cousin who is always finding more faults with her, and Lord M tells her to take Albert out of doors, to make a day of it, to paint and sketch, and to find a commonality in something they both enjoy.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>She wishes he would not; wishes he would let her manage this in her own way. She has required his support, his patience, his friendship, and even his love, though she believes, in the end, that they have all been given to her freely. She does not require his services as a matchmaker too. Not after everything.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Not even she is that selfish.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Albert makes no comment about her sketches, though. He only complains about the trees and chastises her about Mama, and he doesn’t know a thing about it.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Except his reply gives her pause, because she knows but she has also forgotten that his own mother is dead, and when he says it, he looks so very sad.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>She does not understand Albert one bit. She does not care for him, does not want him, and wonders why on earth Uncle Leopold or anyone else might think it a good idea for her to marry him, but sadness and loss, those are things that, of late, she understands perfectly.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Perhaps Albert is not the immovable stone she has thought him; at least not entirely.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>That does not make her like him enough to change her mind. She knows, in fact, that nothing will. Albert has travelled all the way across Europe to rob her of the best thing she has ever possessed—the companionship of her Lord M—and she thinks she may never be able to forgive him for it.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>~<br/></em>
</p><p>He arranges for her to meet with the Lord Chamberlain, and the moment he sees her waiting for him at the window, he knows she is out of sorts. It’s evident in the tenseness of her shoulders and the crease that has formed where she has pulled her eyebrows tightly together into a frown.</p><p>He does not ask. The Queen, in all her God-given spirit and stubbornness, is best left to tell him of her preoccupations in her own time, he has learned. There are times when she will simply not be coaxed, and the firm set of her jaw tells him that this is one of them.</p><p>“Lord Melbourne,” she finally says, and he does not miss the absence of the nickname she has had for him almost since the first, “did you know that my father had a mistress?”</p><p>There are a thousand things he could say to that, he thinks as the reason for her unease and apparent fascination with the view out the window suddenly becomes plain to him. She always does pay such close attention exactly when he does not wish her to, and he imagines that the knowledge of her uncle Leopold’s indiscretions has been a most unwelcome addition to whatever anxieties ordinarily plague a young bride.</p><p>He settles on honesty because that is what he has always tried to give her, as far as he has been able, and says “Madame St. Laurent? Oh, yes. I believe they were quite devoted to each other.”</p><p> “Really?” she scoffs, and he can see that his attempt to gentle his answer has been for nothing as her frown deepens, but then the Lord Chamberlain is there and he is taking down notes and helping her plan for her wedding to the Prince.</p><p>There will be plenty of time, he thinks, for her worries to sort themselves out later.</p><p>~</p><p><em>It has been quite some time, he thinks wearily, since he has disliked anyone so much as he does Prince Albert.</em> </p><p>
  <em>Can the boy not see what he is doing to her with his brusqueness and his careless words? Melbourne watches her at her desk and sees the new stiffness in her spine. He sees the tension in her brow as they walk. He has tried to extricate himself from her in the days since Brocket Hall. Has tried, even as she has relied on him and passed as many hours in his presence as she can without raising even further suspicions, to be a Prime Minister to her more than anything else, but he sees the toll that the Coburgs’ arrival has had on her, and he cannot withdraw from her entirely; not if she still needs him to smooth her way. He finds himself courting her affections on the Prince’s behalf, thinking that if he can coax her into smiling for the boy, perhaps the boy will finally smile at her and things will ease between them. He does wonder how much of his heart will be left intact when he finally leaves her to a marriage and children and a happy reign—be it with Prince Albert or some other man—and retires to Brocket Hall for good. It breaks for her a little when they sit together on a bench out of doors and she asks him very quietly “Am I really so ridiculous as Albert thinks me, Lord M?”</em>
</p><p>
  <em>He has just spent the better part of two hours discussing her military’s movements and the latest news of the Chartists with her, and though she might not possess the rhetoric of an MP, she understands it all perfectly. He could not possibly be more pleased with her, which is why it incenses him so to see her bullied into doubting herself now, after she has only just learned to believe that she is capable, truly, of being Queen.</em>
</p><p><em>“No,” he tells her because he will not do her the disservice of treating her like a fool and telling her that Prince Albert thinks her nothing of the sort. The boy has made his opinion of her perfectly plain, and Melbourne does not care to remember the last time he wanted so badly to call a man to account for his treatment of a woman. “You need never doubt it. The Prince will see the truth of you, soon enough.”</em> </p><p>
  <em>He had better, because Melbourne has not seen her look so discouraged since Flora Hastings.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>“Are you sure?” she asks him worriedly. “Albert went on and on about modern economics and the working conditions of the poor at yesterday’s luncheon and none of it made any sense to me. I have actually begun reading Oliver Twist, just so that I will understand what he means when he describes Mr. Dickens’ work.”</em>
</p><p>
  <em>He winces. “Generally, Ma’am, I don’t recommend novels as a source of reliable information.” Especially not Dickens. The man will put anything into print, he well knows. “If you want to know more about poverty and working conditions, I shall simply bring you more reports and we will go over them together.”</em>
</p><p>
  <em>The look of gratitude she gives him makes him want to give her cousin a good dressing down. Can the boy not see that she is everything lovely and good? Can he not, if he must, look past her smiles to see how seriously she takes her duties as Queen? </em>
</p><p>
  <em>Is the boy somehow blind to how beautiful she is? Melbourne cannot imagine any man to be so. He sees her every day, and yet he has never been able to deny it. He has known a great many handsome women, to be sure, but the Queen has lately grown into herself and possesses such an unmatched combination of elegance and attractiveness that she is without question the most striking woman of his acquaintance. He would think her so even if he did not care for her, but he does, and so he checks himself every day when he greets her. He can love her in silence if he wants to be foolish, and oh, it seems he does because his heart insists on doing just that, but he knows better than to allow himself too far into the dangerous territory of desiring her. It would be a path of no return.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>The Prince, however, will not be expected to return, and so may desire her at will, though something within Melbourne bristles at the thought. She is being offered up to her cousin on a silver platter by her Mama, her Uncle, even by himself, but the Prince seems to be the only man in Europe who is unenchanted by her, insults her and is painfully rude to her, and Melbourne is left to piece her back together after each hurtful word the Prince directs to unfeelingly at her.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>“We will expect you for dinner tonight,” she tells him as they finally rise from their bench and set out across her lawn toward the palace. “There will be dancing afterwards.”</em>
</p><p>
  <em>“Dancing?”</em>
</p><p>
  <em>She has been frowning for days. He knows very well that she is in no mood to dance.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>“Yes,” she sighs. “At Uncle Leopold’s request,” and then he understands perfectly well.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>They say no one waltzes so well as a German, and if the boy can only accomplish the asking without offending her, he might just be able to impress her without speaking a word. It is, he must admit, a very good idea.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Still, she is a young woman of twenty. She shouldn’t look harassed at the prospect of dancing at a ball, so that evening, before he sets out for the palace, he sends her flowers and tells himself she need never know that gardenias stand for a secret love.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>~</em>
</p><p>He underestimates her ability to agonize over what she should not.</p><p>He still helps her with the boxes. Every morning he arrives to sort through them with her because she still requests that he do so. He does wish, though, that he could manage to stop counting the mornings together that they have left.</p><p>She has always preferred walking to sitting, and he has lost count of how many hours he has passed with her on the palace grounds, discussing everything from affairs of state to the skill of her gardeners. Even now, when the weather has turned cold, she insists—quite agitatedly—on having her pelisse fetched and taking a long walk in the middle of the morning.</p><p>They are not halfway through her flowerbeds, wilted for the winter, when she turns to him, hands clasped tight and looking jittery as a fresh colt, and asks “Lord M, will you—will you tell me about your wife?”</p><p> “About Caro?” he asks without thinking, too startled to check himself, and to his near-disbelief she stills her wringing hands, squares her shoulders at him, and nods.</p><p>“Yes,” she says determinedly. “About Caro.”</p><p>The moments required for him to form an answer are surreal ones. She wants to know <em>about Caro?</em> What can have gotten into her head? She cannot be so frightened of her Uncle Leopold’s illicit behavior that it has put her off a Prince she was captivated by only a few weeks ago.</p><p>She is looking up at him with such wide, earnest eyes though, and he finds himself utterly baffled by her for perhaps the first time in their acquaintance. She has to have heard the stories. He’s quite certain there isn’t a person in London or, indeed, in England who hasn’t. Even if she has only heard the barest few, they should have been enough to put her off the subject entirely, but apparently they have not been and he can only stare at her in bewilderment.</p><p>
  <em>Completely artless. She no sooner has a thought than she expresses it. She is entirely too impulsive for a Queen.</em>
</p><p>And yet, he would not have her any other way. She has been so much better at minding her tongue of late. She learned a lesson, he thinks, during the time when she was fending both Peel and Wellington off with her ladies’ skirts, and she has taken it to heart which leaves him wondering what on God’s earth has brought her to this.</p><p>
  <em>After everything.</em>
</p><p>“If you don’t mind me asking, Ma’am, <em>why</em> do you want to know about Caro?”</p><p>He watches her look at her hands, then at the ground beneath her. Watches her swallow and choose her words.</p><p>“You always talk of everything <em>but</em> her. I asked you about her once but you never gave me an answer, and…surely I am not such a young girl anymore?”</p><p>Such a young girl—? No, she is not the same girl of eighteen she was the last time she broached the subject of his marriage. She is a young woman now, which almost makes it worse.</p><p>“Ma’am, I—”</p><p>“Please, Lord M.” she interrupts imploringly. “You are my—my friend, and I am <em>not</em> such a young girl anymore, I am getting married, and I am…nervous<em>.</em> I asked Mama about Uncle Leopold but it did not help, and you know…well, you <em>know, </em>and I do not.”</p><p>
  <em>He does not want to. </em>
</p><p>He has no wish to look into her dear, young, unspoiled face and shock her. He is hardly qualified to be discussing any marriage with her, whether it be his own, ended one or her upcoming one. He tells her just that, but she will not be swayed.</p><p>He could refuse her, he supposes. He would be well within his rights to simply say that it is not a story he cares to tell and to be done with it, even if she <em>is</em> the Queen.</p><p>But he knows her.</p><p>She would always wonder, and if she has worked up the courage required to ask, then she must be a good deal more than nervous.</p><p>
  <em>He would not tell it, would not relive it, for anybody else.</em>
</p><p>At a loss for how to explain to her the insanity of it all, he starts all the way at the beginning, with young, wild Caro Ponsonby, carefree and utterly enthralling, and he tells her of his mother’s grand ambitions for him and how they became, for a time, his own. He tells her about the wretchedness of the entire Byron affair, because that, he assumes, is what she truly wishes to know about, though he does leave out the very worst of it—the fits, and the laudanum, and the terrible scene at Lady Heathcote’s ball—and ends with coming home from Ireland to watch his wife die at Brocket Hall.</p><p>He cannot imagine how any of what he has said might soothe her fears about marriage, except that he thinks it highly unlikely Prince Albert will ever conduct himself in any fashion approaching even the most subdued of Caro’s performances, let alone her truly spectacular ones, but she just listens to him intently the whole time, only interrupting with questions in places he expects her to.</p><p>By the end of it she is simply staring into the distance and shaking her head, and he does wonder what an unspoiled girl of twenty who has found the existence of her uncle’s mistress shocking must make of the tale he has just told.</p><p>“All of that…” she begins finally, after several minutes of silence have passed. “After she betrayed you and embarrassed you—it just made you kind?”</p><p>She takes his breath away. He can only stare at her, because all of Britain seems to know the story, yet her reaction, as always, is singular.</p><p>
  <em>Is that all she thinks she has learned?</em>
</p><p>“Do not think me such a saint, Ma’am,” he tells her in the hush of the deserted grounds. “I did hate her by the end of it, when the marriage was so completely devoid of any…”</p><p>“Civilities?” she whispers with wide eyes, and <em>oh, she does listen.</em> He knows she does, always, but then sometimes she opens her mouth and says his own words back to him, and he is helpless to be anything but stunned that she has allowed him to form her, in some small way. He remembers the day he told her that so clearly. Remembers holding her small, trembling hands in his own and lying to her, just as he remembers the terrible pain that came during and after, along with the realization that he had become a helpless fool for her and that there was no hope left for him at all.</p><p>
  <em>None at all.</em>
</p><p>“Yes, Ma’am,” he says just as quietly, finding that the words have the undeniable ring of truth and are terribly loud between them. “Completely devoid of any civilities.”</p><p>“But you never disowned her,” she says almost absently. “Why?”</p><p>
  <em>No longer a girl, but still so very, very young.</em>
</p><p>“Because I loved her, too. In my own way.” Exhausted, beaten down, bruised thing that his heart was by the time it was all over. Slowly fading away until he went to meet a new Queen and found a reason, however inadvisable, for his heart to stay.</p><p>He watches her frown; watches her puzzle over his words and wonder at them, and that she can still fascinate him even a little in this moment, after he has relived it all, just proves to him all the more that he is a fool, above all.</p><p>“At the same time?” she finally asks, and he can only smile at her a little, in spite of everything, because every once in a while she makes him remember what it truly felt like to be young and innocent of all. The Prince will surely cherish her, the bright little Queen who devotes herself wholly to whatever she loves without a second thought.</p><p>“Yes, at the same time,” he tells her. And she really is, contrary to whatever she might claim, too young to understand <em>that</em>, which is just as it should be.</p><p>When she smiles at him in return he thinks that it was, perhaps, time for her to know. He cannot protect her from every untoward thing, least of all himself.</p><p>~</p><p>She chooses white for her wedding dress and cannot help but wonder if she has done so because she likes the color, or because she wishes to make perfectly plain to Albert that Lord M has, at least, ensured that she will be a spotless bride.</p><p>She remembers the look in Lord M’s eyes when he told her the story of his wife. She knows he was expecting her to be scandalized and to lower her opinion of him the entire time; knew it, in fact, before he even began to tell his tale. And the truth of it, of his wife, <em>has</em> changed her opinion of him.</p><p>She thinks she admires him now than she ever has, dear Lord M who has stood by her side as loyally as any knight and who has fought for her time and time again. She is learning, slowly, that the world is very cruel. And yet he has, as she knew he would and in a very strange way, eased her mind.</p><p>If Lord M can suffer through so much and still do his duty—<em>and still smile at her that very first day and be nothing but kind—</em>then she can surely manage whatever comes after her wedding to Albert and do the same.</p><p>He believes her capable of it, has always believed in her so very much, and there could never be anything worse, she thinks, than failing to live up to his faith in her.</p><p>~</p><p>Weeks pass.</p><p>The Queen receives letters from the Prince and he receives letters from Leopold, who is still angry about the matter of a title and allowance.</p><p>“It is almost as though Albert does not believe me when I tell him that you have <em>tried.</em> That you took the bill to Parliament and did all you could,” the Queen says exasperatedly, clutching the Prince’s latest missive in her small hand as they discuss the matter for what must be the third or fourth time. “It is almost as if he thinks you <em>meant</em> to fail.”</p><p>The words snag at his attention and he frowns at her, concerned.</p><p>“Why would the Prince come to that conclusion, Ma’am?”</p><p>He watches her as she seems to catch herself; to realize, startled, exactly what she has said, and he wonders at her. <em>As though the Prince thinks he meant to fail.</em> He hopes very much that she does not speak of him to the Prince more than is absolutely necessary. She has always been overfond of him, but while he has treasured her friendship and affections more than all else in the years he has known her, she <em>must</em> relinquish him now.</p><p>No man, no matter how happily married, will suffer his wife to behave toward another man the way the Queen behaves toward him, even if she has, at long last thanks to the Prince, seemed to recover from Brocket Hall.</p><p>
  <em>He only wishes he could say the same of himself.</em>
</p><p>She shakes her head and laughs strangely as she tells him “Albert would not think it. I don’t know why he would. It’s probably just nonsense from Uncle Leopold, like you said.”</p><p>And he does wonder.</p><p>He tells her to make the Prince a Knight of the Garter, though he knows it will do a poor job of soothing the boy’s pride, and he returns to Dover House for the night still pondering the Queen’s words.</p><p>He remembers the beginning of it. Remembers how the Prince needled at her and how hurt she was by it, and he knows very well that the Prince would have been kinder to her from the start had she not looked to <em>him</em> instead of to the boy, just as he knows with entirely too much certainty that she looks to him still.</p><p>The Queen is ever a loyal creature, and even if she does care for the Prince, even if she is well on her way to being a happy bride, young and in love, something in her will always look to him so long as he is near. She has since the very first, and he has always done everything in his power to guide her opinions without making them into nothing more than copies of his own.</p><p>Perhaps…perhaps it truly is time, he thinks with a mounting grief that he has no right to. There must be distance after the wedding, but he remembers all too well the Queen’s reaction to being told that he must go away. She will need to look to her husband now, not to him, and if the last thing he does for her is to help her do just that, then so be it.</p><p>She will be married, and he will finally resign. He will withdraw from the ministry and from the leadership of the Whigs, and he will retire to Brocket Hall. Palmerston will fill his place in the House admirably, and Prince Albert will do the same at the palace.</p><p>
  <em>And he will miss her—will long for just one more day at her side—with his every aching breath.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>~</em>
</p><p>
  <em>When the footman arrives with a box of flowers from Brocket Hall, she finds herself wasting a small smile on nobody at all. So many of her smiles have been demanded of her, of late, but this one feels like a gift and she is determined to enjoy it, even if it aches a little.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>They are not orchids, but they are perfect, and this way he will be with her the entire night. When she is finished with them she will press them, just like before, and she will have a little collection of blooms to remind her of the happy years when it seemed, for all the world, as though it would be just the two of them forever.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>~<br/></em>
</p><p>She settles the matter of the wedding trip without Lord M’s help.</p><p>It is Albert who first reminds her of it in one of his letters, and Victoria, expecting to feel a great rush of nerves at the prospect, feels only a dreadful weariness settle over her instead.</p><p>Days and days on end of nothing but Albert. She cannot imagine it.</p><p>For what she thinks must be the first time in her reign, she is very glad to be a Queen with too many duties to allow time for almost anything else.</p><p>Two days, she thinks. They will pass two days at dreary Windsor—she winces, after everything, but it is the best she can do—and then they will return and she will be Queen once more.</p><p>She still takes her walks with Lord M.</p><p>The palace has never felt so stifling as it has in the months since Albert first arrived, and when they walk together out on the grounds and talk of everything <em>but</em> her wedding, it feels as though she can finally breathe again.</p><p>They talk of the latest dispatches; of the goings on in the House and the reception planned for the day after next.</p><p>They talk of the coming of spring, not so far away, and she asks if he will not soon visit Brocket Hall to tend to his glasshouses.</p><p>And instead of telling her that he will, as she expects, soon visit his country home, he tells her very gently that he will shortly be retiring there and does not plan to return.</p><p>It knocks the breath from her.</p><p>She has not prepared herself for it; has long known that it was coming but never expected it to be so <em>soon, </em>and now that it is upon her she finds that no matter how desperately she inhales, she cannot help but feel as though she is suffocating and will never recover.</p><p>He cannot leave her yet. She still needs him so much; if not for political advice, then for the stability and comfort he brings her just by being near. He is the only person in the whole world she feels she can trust completely, and she cannot bear the thought of losing him.</p><p>
  <em>Not yet.</em>
</p><p>A thousand thoughts fly through her mind all at once; a thousand things to say and a thousand ways to plead with him to stay. To ask that even if he will not stay for the Whigs, he will surely stay for <em>her.</em></p><p>She says none of them because she remembers what she is certain must be nearly every lesson he has ever taught her, and they are all based upon the same principle.</p><p>
  <em>There is a difference—a very great divide—between duty and inclination.</em>
</p><p>She never knew the meaning of the word duty before she met him; before she watched him carry it out for her without fail. She never knew the meaning of the word inclination, either, before she found that she possessed one for him.</p><p><em>This is the moment,</em> she thinks breathlessly, staring at him. This is the moment she shows how very deeply her gratitude to him runs by doing her duty to him in return and being dignified.</p><p>
  <em>Smile and wave.</em>
</p><p>“You will be so very missed, Lord M,” she manages, and he just smiles his strange little smile and tells her that he is assured he is leaving her in capable hands. She tries to thank him. Tries to find a way to express gratitude for all that he has done for her, but all of the words she can think of are simply so small, and he has been so very much to her.</p><p>She cannot help them, the words that do slip out of her before she can turn from him and continue on her way. They seem to escape her without permission and she cannot take them back.</p><p>“I hope you will think of me, at Brocket Hall with your rooks.”</p><p>And once again, she cannot breathe because she cannot <em>believe</em> what she has just said. They never speak of that day. They never speak of rooks, or orchids, or anything to do with it, yet now she has and he only gazes solemnly at her and says very quietly “I will, Ma’am.”</p><p>She wants so badly to cry.</p><p>Instead she turns and makes her way toward the palace, and she does not hear his whisper as she walks away.</p><p>
  <em>“More than you know.”</em>
</p><p>
  <em>~</em>
</p><p>
  <em>She wears his flowers at her breast, and she is beautiful.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Smiling. She is smiling, truly, for the first time in days, and Coburg though he may be, Prince Ernest has his sincerest gratitude for whatever charming thing he has said to bring that expression to her face again at long last.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>He has missed it in the days since Brocket Hall.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Now she dances her way across the ballroom in her cousin’s arms, sparkling if he has ever seen a woman do so, and he thinks every man present must be half in love with her.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Except Prince Albert.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>The boy stands stiff and fidgeting in the corner, and Melbourne cannot tell if the hungry glower he directs at the Queen is because he has finally deigned to notice that she is lovely, and glowing, and passionate, and everything a man could ever hope for in a wife and more, or because Leopold has once again impressed upon him the importance of winning the hand of the most eligible match in Europe. If the former, the Prince has finally found his sense and Melbourne will watch with a bittersweet relief as he finally courts her as he should. If the latter, then the boy will never be worthy of her. She is the Queen of England, and there will be another, wiser, better-suited prince just waiting to claim the prize that Prince Albert will not.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>But the boy is certainly riveted to her, if nothing else, and Melbourne cannot blame him. She is and always has been utterly captivating, the constant fire she has had since the day he met her, just a girl locked away from the world at Kensington, drawing eyes to her like moths to a flame.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>The dance ends and as her cousin leaves her to catch her breath he watches her turn, knowing even before her eyes settle on his own that she is going to come to him.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>She always does.</em>
</p><p><em>He wonders how he can have been such a blind fool to her for so long. How he can have forgotten what a woman’s wanting—such a precious, fragile thing—looks like, and thinks it can only be because he has tried for so long and so unsuccessfully to keep himself from wanting her. From wanting her smiles and the affection in her eyes that she has always given him too freely; things he would have no right to, even if he were a younger man not called to serve at the pleasure of the Crown.</em> </p><p>
  <em>He is allowed to protect her, allowed to teach her and guide her, allowed to treasure her, even, but he is never allowed to want her.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Though, undeniably, that has not stopped him until now and he doubts it will in all the years to come. Whether she is near enough to touch or so far that he only reads her name in the papers, he thinks that he will never escape the wanting of her. </em>
</p><p>
  <em>When she takes his hands in her own, small ones and says “Dear Lord M, you came,” with a smile that tells him that a part of her doubted he would, he can only smile at her in return and set aside caring, for a moment, that she should have gone to her cousin Albert in the lull between dances instead of him.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Of course he came. There is very little in him that is capable of refusing her. What little there is exerts itself almost past bearing keeping her at arm’s length, always reminding her that duty must preside over inclination, and that if she will only allow it, her inclinations can surely change, even if he knows very well that his never will. She is young and has never lacked for the attentions of the very finest of Europe’s men. She can and will recover from his folly yet.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>“Thank you for the flowers,” she says. “They are beautiful, and I was so happy when they came.”</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Yes, he’d hoped she would be. Had hoped, as he sent them, only to soothe what he knows have been her worn-thin nerves these past days, and to distract her from torturing herself with all that the Prince has told her she does wrong. Seeing her wear them is an unwise pleasure that he allows himself only because it is silent and known to nobody but him, and because it makes her smile.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>“Then they are worthy of you, Ma’am,” he tells her and means it more than he can say. “The glasshouses of Brocket Hall are always at your service.” He will send her flowers every day of the Prince’s visit if they will continue to ease her frowns and reassure her that she is, and always has been, a spectacular Queen.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>He watches her catch her breath as the musicians ready themselves to play another song, and when the first notes of a waltz fill the room, she squeezes his hands.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>“Won’t you ask me to dance?” she says with wide, hopeful eyes.</em>
</p><p><em>She has grown bold with him—too bold, no doubt—in the time since they have known each other. He is reminded almost forcibly of her coronation ball. Of the very young girl who became tipsy with too much champagne and entirely too honest with him, alone in the hall.</em> </p><p>
  <em>If he danced with her now—if he waltzed with her—he would no longer be dancing with the girl who somehow managed, with all her youthful spirit and determination, to startle him into waking up and to remind him of the heart he thought dead and gone the moment his boy left him for an early grave. He would be dancing with a stunning young woman he has long cared for beyond all reason, and there would be no hope left for either of them.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>He is no longer a man unnerved by a vaguely inconvenient fondness for a girl he knows very well can never be his to keep. He loves her now, and though he can never forget it, she must.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>“I think your cousin would very much like the honor, Ma’am,” he tells her quietly, pressing her hands between his in return, and yes, he can already see the Prince coming for her from across the ballroom.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Her entire countenance falls. Her smile has vanished and her eyes have filled with anxiousness and pain. “He does not like me,” she says, and he can hear the doubt the boy has filled her with coloring her tone, and he hates it. “He thinks me foolish and he will only frown.”</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Beautiful, elegant Queen Victoria, who is everything any man could ever desire, and the boy had better get it right this time, he thinks as he watches him stride toward her, halfway through the crowd now. The boy had better hold her in his arms and think her everything lovely and good, or he will at last step in as her private secretary and tell Leopold to take his young charges back to Coburg. He will find her a Danish prince, perhaps, or a better-suited German, or even a particularly fine English duke, but he will not allow Prince Albert to decimate everything that she is.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>But the boy may have one more chance.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>“Just try, Ma’am,” he asks of her, feeling for all the world as though he is being unforgivably cruel as he watches the nervousness settle over her, and it makes him honest with her. “You are loveliness itself, and to dance with you—not even the Prince could fail to smile at you for such a privilege.”</em>
</p><p>
  <em>A privilege she has offered to him instead. The right to, however briefly, lay his hand on her waist and stand close enough to smell the scent of his gardenias at her breast. He could have it. She wants him to, though she perhaps does not entirely understand what such a thing would entail now that she has grown past girlhood, and that wanting of hers, directed against all sound advice at him, will be the end of him, he thinks.</em>
</p><p><em>The inevitable losing of it will certainly be.</em> </p><p>
  <em>Her downcast eyes tell him that she does not believe his words about the Prince, and he hopes to God that he is right because the boy is finally upon her, offering out an arm. “Ma’am,” he says quietly, nodding behind her so that she will look and releasing her tiny hands when she does.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>They make a fine pair, he thinks as they take the floor together, two cousins from a family that has, if nothing else, proven itself accomplished at producing beautiful children, and he feels a very old, nearly forgotten and now wholly absurd flare of jealousy spike in his chest as the boy does, in fact, take her into his arms to waltz.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>It should no longer comes as a surprise, he thinks as he watches them spin so gracefully together. As he watches her hold the boy’s eyes, apparently captivated by him. As he watches the boy apparently—finally—get something right, and she reaches up to take the flowers—the gardenias—from their place at her breast and give them to the Prince.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>He should really be accustomed by now to watching the women he loves leave him for other men. She has, after all, never been his to keep.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>~</em>
</p><p>Albert, though he longs to be at Victoria’s side once more, dreads the journey back to England with Papa.</p><p>He holds his mother’s portrait in his hands and listens to Ernest tell him a story of her that he has never heard before. Of her sad, and kept away, and still loving them in spite of all.</p><p>“Perhaps it was…easier to believe that she did not love us. And we had each other.”</p><p>Ernest, who has, regardless of whatever else he might be, been nothing less than Albert’s only friend for many, many years.</p><p>“And now you have Victoria, and she will never leave you.”</p><p>He knows what Ernest means, but he wishes his brother would say it another way.</p><p>It sounds awful when Ernest says it like that.</p><p>~</p><p>
  <em>Victoria thinks there must be a cord leading straight from him to her.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Albert dances very well. He is, in fact, perhaps the best partner she has ever had—certainly, he is the handsomest—yet she has not a single thought in her head to spare for him because she is so very aware of Lord M’s gaze, heavy on her like the heat of a hand against her skin. With each spin the sensation drifts from one side of her to another, and although she can only see him out of the very corner of her eye, she knows beyond any doubt that for as long as the waltz goes on, the entirety of his attention will be fixed on her.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>That he should watch her is no surprise. She has known his attentiveness and guidance for nearly as long as she has known him. She has known his tenderness and care for months and months, his friendship for so long that she does not know what she will do when he inevitably does as he has promised and leaves her in truth. Perhaps it is the music, or the impending separation that is her constant and unbearable dread, or maybe it is his flowers at her breast and his eyes fixed unswervingly on her from all the way across the room—in truth, it could be any one of those things or a combination of all three—but tonight is the first time she has ever known the heat of him. The first time she has ever felt the potency of it, and it steals her breath from her and makes her stomach tense. </em>
</p><p>
  <em>She should be angry with him, she thinks, for refusing to dance with her and insisting that she dance with Albert instead. It had been a wretched moment, tearing her eyes from him only to find her cousin behind her, arm outstretched, and the beginning steps of the dance had felt so fatal. She cannot find it in herself to be angry with him though; she feels only a terrible, lingering melancholy that seems to ebb and flow with the count of the music. She has never been so caught up in a dance, has never felt so attended to and has never felt heat rush down her spine in response to nothing but a look.</em>
</p><p><em>She has never in all her life known she could be so in love, so aware of another person, and yet she feels it all for Lord M, who is not the man holding her in his arms.</em> </p><p>
  <em>Still, she stands straighter and fixes her eyes on Albert’s as though he is the only thing holding her up because with Lord M watching she knows she must at least try. To do anything else would only hurt him. She knows because he has been telling her exactly that in a hundred different ways, beginning with his rooks at Brocket Hall.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>She forces herself to focus on Albert’s words only because she thinks that Lord M surely does not mean for her to be so affected by his gaze, and because it is so hard to pay attention to anything at all while she can feel it on her. Albert makes a silly excuse for his rudeness, blaming it on the fear of appearing ridiculous, and does he imagine that she does not daily feel the same? She is the Queen and she knows very well that nearly everyone, with the exception of Lord M, finds fault with her both for her age and her sex even on the days she executes her duties perfectly. Yet the censure does not often make her rude and stiff as a poker. Albert will need to find his footing quickly and maintain it if he is so very afraid of being wrongfooted as all that.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>But then…then he is speaking again of his mother, and she remembers well enough from the gardens the look of wistfulness that comes over him whenever he thinks of her. Lord M is always telling her to find a commonality with Albert, and she thinks that if one exists, it must be this—that they both know very well what it is to lose someone precious to them. She can admire him, at least, for how much he still loves his poor mama.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>The heat running down her spine curdles into cold in her stomach when he fixes his eyes on Lord M’s flowers, because she knows exactly what Lord M would tell her.</em>
</p><p><em>‘Just try,’ she can almost hear him say again to her in her mind. ‘If his frowns bother you so much, then give him something he cannot fail to smile at instead.’</em> </p><p><em>Try.</em> </p><p>
  <em>It feels so wrong to reach up and remove his flowers from the front of her gown. She is left feeling bereft and very nearly bare, but she holds them out to Albert and tells him that he must have them, and she wonders if he might even smile at her now, if he ever smiles at all.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>He does not smile.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Instead he pulls out a blade and she draws back sharply. His shirt—he cuts his shirt and opens it, and she watches him tuck Lord M’s flowers against the bare skin of his chest.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>She feels as though he has taken her every covering away and left her naked in the crowded ballroom. Lord M’s flowers, she thinks, nearly sick with it.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Suddenly she cannot bear it even a minute longer, his gaze on her. The music has finally ended and as soon as Albert bows to her, she walks away, retiring for the night unreasonably early because no matter which corner of the ballroom she chooses to hide herself in, she knows Lord M will see her.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>He always does.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>That night, as Skerrett readies her for bed, she thinks of what she and Albert have just done. Perhaps they needn’t fight all of the time. He is, after all, capable of more feeling than she has previously given him credit for. She might even take him to Windsor, she thinks. Maybe if she lets him see some of the trees he so loves things will not be quite so difficult as they have been so far. And besides, maybe without the crush of London surrounding her, she will finally be able to breathe again. </em>
</p><p>
  <em>After Skerrett has left her and only one candle remains lit, she reaches for the book that rests on her bedside table and opens it.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>She holds the orchids pressed within its pages, and she finally allows herself to weep.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>~</em>
</p><p>Albert hardly recognizes her.</p><p>Sitting on her throne and wearing her crown, she is so foreign from the Victoria he remembers from Windsor; the one with her hair unbound and the sunlight on her skin.</p><p>Some things, however, remain the same of her whether she is Victoria of the woods, or Victoria the Queen. The smallness of her frame, the stubborn tilt of her head, and Melbourne, <em>always Melbourne,</em> by her side.</p><p>She patronizes him.</p><p>Albert has spent months in Coburg, dreaming of her; thinking of ways he might be able to make her smile. He has spent hours imagining her unbound again. Hours imagining a whole week spent alone with the Victoria from the forest, Victoria with the scent of flowers on her skin and hair, on their honeymoon. She receives him now with a ceremony and a meaningless title as though she thinks she can hand him a trinket, a fancy sash, and make him pleased to be only the poor relation, always waiting for her to smile on him, for the rest of his life.</p><p>Albert is nearly certain it is Lord Melbourne’s idea.</p><p>“It is the very highest order of chivalry, Sir,” the man says when he fails to show the sufficient enthusiasm, as though Victoria is incapable of speaking for herself and must be helped along.</p><p>“Are you one, too, Lord Melbourne?”</p><p>“No, Sir.”</p><p>Of course not. Lord Melbourne does not need a ceremony and a fancy sash for the world to know that he is the Queen’s favorite. Victoria does a remarkable job of making that clear on her own. Nor does he require a knighthood for her court to consider him a man of worth.</p><p>“But, of course, you have a seat in the House of Lords.”</p><p>She knights him.</p><p>Then she tells him that their honeymoon will not be a week, like everyone else’s, but a spare two days squeezed snugly between her affairs of state, and that Lord Melbourne’s spy will be waiting for him when they return.</p><p>He supposes Melbourne has no need of spying on <em>her.</em> She allows him to be near her every second of the day. He should, he supposes, be grateful that she can spare the time away from her <em>Lord M</em> to spend on a wedding trip with him.</p><p>She dismisses him like a footman when he dares to tell her that this is not what they agreed on when he left for Coburg. That she has not kept her promise to distance herself from Melbourne, and that she has given him nothing of his own. She calls him rude and tells him that he has tired himself, <em>like a child,</em> and sends him off to bed.</p><p>He has dreamed of Victoria for months.</p><p>Now that he is here, he does not know if he can bear to stay.</p><p>~</p><p>
  <em>He retires soon after she does, but it is a long time before sleep finds him so he seeks the company of brandy instead.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>He should feel relieved to know that the Queen has at last found an understanding with her suitor. He should be pleased, in fact, to have helped in any way to bring it about.</em>
</p><p><em>To have provided her with the very flowers that so clearly captivated the Prince.</em> </p><p>
  <em>There are a great many things, he supposes, that he should be when it comes to the Queen. Distanced, for one, and indifferent for another. He should be pleased to see her finally accept Prince Albert’s suit, most definitely, and tomorrow he will be. Tomorrow he will bring her the daily reports and she will be as endearing to him as she has ever been, and he will be relieved to see her unhappiness drift away.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Tonight though, he will drink and know himself to be the biggest fool that ever was.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>~<br/></em>
</p><p>
  <em>As it happens, she never reads the reports he brings to her the next day.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Instead she moves her entire court to Windsor on a Wednesday because she seems to have developed a sudden fondness for trees.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>He really should make up a better excuse he thinks to himself when, as she always does, she pays no heed to his words about his work and the House. She simply tells him he is expected to present himself at Windsor in time to dine, and so he does.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>The Queen he is greeted by is an altogether different person from the one he has known since Brocket Hall, or indeed, perhaps even since Kensington.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>She smiles more and she is gracious with her cousins. She shows the Prince the Windsor collection, and apparently her new interests have not been limited to trees, because he is quite certain she did not know so much about art and paintings only a week ago. She is patient and attentive, and she pays no heed when her cousin makes a pointed remark about flattery that he knows is directed at him. The boy surely thinks he has ingratiated himself to her, as half of London does, and if it were only so, if he had only had any part in making her care for him, he could surely have likewise made her indifferent to him before they ever found themselves in the mess of the past months and even years, but he has not and so he cannot. Besides, Prince Albert seems to be doing a fair enough job of turning her head himself. The two are fast, if unlikely friends, talking animatedly about everything from riding out to Dickens, and though she will not let him go, turning to him every so often with her wide eyes and saying “Lord M?” as sweetly as she ever has, he thinks the two are well on their way. She is perhaps not a woman caught in the first throes of love, but she is trying now, making herself agreeable to the Prince, and if she goes on like this he has no doubt the boy will be half in love with her by morning.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>That is as it should be, but his thoughts, he finds, remain unchanged.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>A woman’s wanting is a precious, fragile thing.</em>
</p><p>~</p><p>Lord M leaves early and does not stay to dine, so Dash is her only comfort that night.</p><p>She holds him close and strokes his silky ears while he licks her nose, and she thinks of how happy she was in those first, bright days of being a new Queen. Everything had been so <em>light</em> after Kensington.</p><p>It would have terrified her, she knows very well, had Lord M not been constantly by her side.</p><p>Now it feels like she is willingly going to prison again. Like she is locking herself up in yet another Kensington system, only this time with Albert, instead of Sir John, to hold the key.</p><p>She does not sleep.</p><p>~</p><p>That he finds the Queen tense and anxious the next morning, with telling shadows beneath her eyes, makes the difficulty of the day all the worse. Of all days for her to be out of sorts, the day before her wedding is perhaps the most inconvenient.</p><p>He tries to ease her mind with calm, steady words and the familiarity of routine in the hopes that she will settle, but she will not be soothed. He remembers his own wedding. Remembers being vaguely disconcerted in the days leading up to it, but cannot imagine that he wore such a downtrodden expression as the Queen does now.</p><p>And he allows himself to wonder, for the first time in many months, whether he has been a blind fool to her once again and if he should now be very concerned.</p><p>~</p><p>
  <em>Things are a little easier in the woods.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>To her surprise, the knot in her chest loosens in the fresh air, and in spite of having Albert at her side, she feels freer now, in the country with London far from sight, than she has since her cousins arrived. Even if Albert is too serious, to be allowed to make like Dash and stretch her legs feels like a gift.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>She laughs with him. She allows him to chase her through the trees, and when he comes close she allows him to stare deeply into her eyes and to touch her hair.</em>
</p><p><em>She thinks, perhaps, if Albert is to be her fate, that it would be better for him to like her, if only a little, so she smiles with him and breathes in the woods he loves so much.</em> </p><p>
  <em>Just for a moment, she thinks to herself, it would surely be bliss to forget.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>And then Dash is crying and her heart lurches, because no, she cannot now bear this too.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>The sight of Dash’s poor, bloody leg makes her want to cry, but Albert is so gentle with him as he binds it up, and she feels the tightly-bound coil around her heart ease just a little. She can admire him for this, she thinks. She can look at him and know that he has at least been sweet to Dash, and she tells him most truthfully that though she might love her pet more than is seemly, it is only because he has loved her back; that he has, perhaps, been the only one who has always done so.</em>
</p><p><em>“But now it is different?”</em> </p><p>
  <em>She is so very foolish, stupid even, and mindful only of dear little Dash and his hurts. She does not think before she tells Albert that aside from Dash, Lord M is her dearest friend in all the world, but she sees her error in his eyes the moment the words leave her mouth, but she has spoken only the truth and she cannot now take them back. </em>
</p><p>
  <em>“I wish you had not been so much with Lord Melbourne. He is not serious.”</em>
</p><p><em>No one, she thinks, is serious enough for Albert, and she is so very conscious of what she has just done. Of the danger of the topic she has unwittingly led them to, but neither can she allow Albert to go on. Lord M is the Prime Minister, and more than that, he is, at the very least, her friend. If Albert is to marry her and be the husband of the Queen, he cannot think poorly of Lord M.</em> </p><p><em>“He does not choose to appear serious—it is the English manner—but Albert,”—and she chooses her words carefully, knows that she must, after speaking so carelessly before—“he is a man of great feeling.”</em> </p><p><em>She does not know exactly what sort of response she is expecting. Albert is so unpredictable, she never knows what will make smile and what will make him frown. She is not, however, expecting him to shout, and to insult Lord M so mercilessly, and to lecture her about </em>her<em> city. Does Albert think that Lord M has never spoken to her of the poor before? That he has been so remiss in her education and left her ignorant of her duties? She has seen the reports herself, has seen the documents and the bills Lord M brings to her, and she has listened well as he has told her of the terrible difficulty there is in getting Parliament to do anything while there are so many unwilling MP’s. Albert, of course, knows nothing of this, and what right does he have to criticize anyone when he is a silly boy who knows neither her country nor her people?</em></p><p>
  <em>“You don’t know him at all,” she tells him, because it is true and she will not allow him to abuse Lord M so terribly when he has been nothing but polite to Albert.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>It is as though she has set a fire under him. She watches his eyes widen, watches him flush all over, watches his chest heave, and she can only stand and listen, horrified, as he spews the most offensive, slanderous vitriol she has ever been forced to listen to in her life, and it is all about Lord M.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Albert calls him a scoundrel. A barnacle. A deceitful flatterer, and he as good as calls her a gullible child in the same breath. She knows very well that Lord M has been the subject of scandal before, but this is something else entirely and she stands aghast, listening as Albert goes on and on. </em>
</p><p>
  <em>“You should not favor him so—all the scandals alone make him a wretch, let alone his politics—but if you want to be lied to then perhaps you should marry—”</em>
</p><p>
  <em>She has never struck a man before, and the force of it leaves her shoulder throbbing and her palm on fire. She stares at him and wonders if she looks just as stupefied as he does.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>She certainly feels it, his last words echoing through her mind.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Perhaps you should marry him.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>She can feel the tears rushing to her eyes, can feel her throat closing and her breaths becoming short and difficult, and she fights against it. Of all the things he could have said—</em>
</p><p>
  <em>“Do not ever speak to me of Lord Melbourne again. Do you hear me?”</em>
</p><p>
  <em>She will shatter, she is certain beyond any doubt, if he does.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>There is a moment’s silence and then—</em>
</p><p>
  <em>“Are you in love with him?” </em>
</p><p>
  <em>And just like that, she knows she has lost. The tears spill out of her without warning, blurring Albert’s shocked face before her.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>She cannot, she cannot—“Not ever again, Albert. Not ever—”</em>
</p><p>
  <em>“—Because he is in love with you.”</em>
</p><p> <em>It is worse, she is stunned to learn, than Brocket Hall. Worse than walking away from Lord M and his rooks, rejected and weeping.</em></p><p>
  <em>Worse than dancing with Leicester at a ball.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>She has never heard the words spoken aloud before, she realizes. Has never heard anyone describe them so bluntly.</em>
</p><p><em>Neither of them has ever once spoken the word ‘love.’</em> </p><p>
  <em>“Don’t,” she can only gasp, because it is unbearable now, with Albert in front of her and Lord M so far beyond her grasp. This is not smiling, she knows. This is not smiling or waving; it is, in fact, allowing Albert to see exactly how hard every bit of this has been to bear, and it seems she can do nothing but weep because he has left her heart on the forest floor, bruised and bleeding.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>After a time, Albert turns from her and she thinks he means to leave her there. Instead he goes to Dash, and she thinks that perhaps the only thing that allows her to follow is the sight of poor little Dash’s wounded leg.</em>
</p><p><em>She does not let Albert carry him. Albert has already been given too much, has already seen too much and now knows too much, and at least something, her heart insists, must remain completely hers.</em> </p><p>
  <em>She cannot give him every precious thing she has.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>The walk back to the castle is long and it gives her the time to compose herself. To think, for a moment, about all that has happened.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>About what Albert must think of her.</em>
</p><p><em>She tries to correct him. He has shouted at her today, and she cannot let him face Lord M like this, angry and sullen, so she tries to tell him that Lord M has never been anything but careful with her. He is always so tender and understanding, yes, but he is never swayed from his duty. He alone, of all the men and women of her acquaintance, has ever behaved completely honorably toward her, but Albert already thinks him a scoundrel, so she cannot be completely certain she has convinced him.</em> </p><p>
  <em>What must he think of her, if she has not?</em>
</p><p>
  <em>But it does not matter. What matters are the horrified expressions that greet her when she and Albert return to the castle in their disheveled state. Mama cries out, Uncle Leopold looks appalled, her ladies shocked, and Lord M—</em>
</p><p>
  <em>She cannot read the expression on his face and does not care to try.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Later, alone in her room, she cries again as she thinks on every moment she and Albert have spent together, and she knows that her time must be very nearly running out.</em>
</p><p><em>No more hiding away.</em> </p><p>
  <em>She wonders if she will ever be able to make him happy in England. If she can, then perhaps they will at least be civil toward one another. She knows he can be gentle; she has seen him tend to Dash. Perhaps he will learn to be not so stiff all the time, and then maybe she can learn to like him a little.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>At the very least, she supposes as she finally dries her eyes and bathes her face to cool it, she should be grateful that he is not Cousin George.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>~</em>
</p><p>She feels a stab of panic rise in her chest when he asks her if she is truly well.</p><p>Panic, because Lord M cannot be seeing through her at long last, so close to the finish. She answers by blaming her unsettled nerves on Uncle Leopold again, on the idea of Albert with a mistress, and she thinks that he must believe her when she tells him how frightened she is of Albert being unhappy here, because it is the truth.</p><p>Albert’s discontent will only make the rest of it all the more difficult.</p><p>He tells her “If that is your concern, then you should tell him the truth,” and she cannot help but think that Lord M would be horrified to learn just how very <em>truthful</em> she and Albert have already been.</p><p>“You always say the truth is overrated.” And perhaps in this case it is. Albert would surely be easier if he did not know, and she—</p><p>Well, things would be no different for her, really. She would be doing her duty regardless, just with one more secret to keep.</p><p>“I do, Ma’am. But then, I was not happily married.”</p><p>
  <em>Lord M, who was so good to tell her all about his wife. She does ask too much of him sometimes, she knows. </em>
</p><p>She wishes for one moment that he could see her, just as he used to. She wishes that she could <em>show</em> him. That he could know about all the fear, and pain, and the terrible dread inside of her. She cannot imagine what he might say if he did, but she would feel better just for the sharing of it with him.</p><p>She would feel better for the lifting of the burden, because when she is truly honest with herself she thinks that even if she had never met Lord M—and what a dark and frightening world <em>that </em>would be—she still would not have fallen in love with Albert, though she cannot force herself to hate him any more than she can to love him.</p><p>Lord M has simply given her a glimpse of what she cannot have.</p><p>Still, she looks out the window and thinks that perhaps he is right. So much passed between her and Albert at Windsor, and they have hardly spoken of it. Perhaps they need to finally talk about the <em>truth. </em>After all, Lord M is leaving her so very soon, and she has a great many years ahead of her with Albert by her side.</p><p>They may as well be honest ones.</p><p>~</p><p>Albert resigns himself to many things after Ernest leaves him alone by Victoria’s little lake.</p><p>He will be married tomorrow, and he tries desperately to reconcile the hopes he had in Coburg for his life with Victoria to the inevitable future he sees unfolding before him now. A future with Victoria as Queen with Melbourne by her side, her constant companion, and with him as the younger son from Germany, unwelcome to the people, the government, and most of all to Victoria. A future of living in Lord Melbourne's palace, of running after Victoria like Dash and waiting for her to notice him.</p><p>It’s horrifying, and if Uncle Leopold would not be enraged beyond bearing by the failure of his long planned-for marriage, he would set off for Coburg immediately and leave Victoria to her own affairs.</p><p>And then there she is, just as he is leaving to try to forget everything that has happened since his return in her gardens that are nothing like the forests at home, Victoria comes walking out to meet him, and he wonders what she can possibly have to say, after everything.</p><p>
  <em>Victoria, sent out by her Lord M, no doubt, to throw him a treat.</em>
</p><p>“Albert, wait!” she calls, and he does not go to meet her, but neither does he make any attempt to avoid her.</p><p>When she catches up to him he really does leave for her gardens and she follows him.</p><p>“Albert, I know you are angry—”</p><p>“Oh? I thought I was being rude.”</p><p>She just stares at him, and he wonders when someone interrupted her last.</p><p>“Yes, you are, but you are angry too, I can see.”</p><p>
  <em>Oh, can she? What a relief to know, when he had just begun to think she could see nothing in the world but Lord Melbourne.</em>
</p><p>“Well, then perhaps you should go find your Lord M to walk with instead. You seem to approve of his manners.”</p><p>
  <em>“Albert—”</em>
</p><p>“Did he even try to get a title for me, Victoria? Or did he just tell you to knight me because he wants me to always stand in a corner, out of everyone else’s way?”</p><p>He can see her physically swallow back against angry words and thinks that if they were at Windsor, she would already have struck him by now.</p><p>“That is not true and you know it, Albert. Lord M took the bill before Parliament twice, just like I told you.”</p><p>“Oh, did he?” He does not tell her that he can just imagine how very hard her Lord M must have fought to win money and stature for her husband</p><p>“Yes, he did. He was very sorry that he could not get you more than he did, but Parliament must be coaxed—”</p><p>“—Coaxed, not commanded, yes I remember from your letter. Did he tell you to write that? It sounds very much like something he would say.”</p><p>When she frowns, he knows he is correct.</p><p>“You promised you would get better, Victoria. You promised there would be <em>distance.”</em></p><p>“There will be distance, it just—”</p><p>“Really? Because I cannot tell.” He is so angry with her. All her promises before he left for Coburg, all her letters, they have come to nothing. “I see only Lord Melbourne by your side as much as ever, always pulling at your strings, choosing my household and filling it with his <em>spies—”</em></p><p>“Lord M is resigning!”</p><p>She says the words so unhappily, sounding so…<em>distressed, </em>and many seconds of silence pass, Victoria's chest heaving and his eyes trained on hers, before he realizes what she actually means.</p><p>
  <em>Melbourne is resigning. He does not believe it.</em>
</p><p>“He is stepping down as Prime Minister?” he asks her incredulously, and he watches her take a deep breath, as though she is preparing to say something very painful.</p><p>“He is retiring from politics entirely and going to live at Brocket Hall. Neither you nor I are likely to see him again.”</p><p>He is…stunned. Melbourne spoke of resigning months ago when Albert visited Parliament, but he never believed him and more than that, never believed that Victoria would <em>allow</em> Melbourne to retire.</p><p>The only thing he can say is “Why?” the news is so off-setting. Melbourne is as attentive to  Victoria as ever and clearly still enjoys her favor as Prime Minister. Much more than that, he has her love and obviously returns it. Albert has studied Lord Melbourne for over a year, but he cannot even begin to understand why the man should leave her now.</p><p>She sighs. “He says that it is time, and…because he knows his duty,” she says in perhaps the smallest voice he has ever heard from her, “and so do I. So you see, soon it will be just you and I, and you will have nothing to fear from Lord M anymore.”</p><p>Nothing to fear? He will have <em>everything</em> to fear. He is not so foolish to think that Victoria will love him simply because she no longer has Melbourne by her side. He imagines, rather, that she will hate him for this. That she will be broken-hearted and blame him. He can already see the hurt of it in her eyes and is sorry for her, in spite of himself.</p><p>Looking at her now, he finds that after all of it, after his visit, and Windsor, and now his return, he cannot imagine her without Melbourne always beside her, constantly watching over her.</p><p>“He is really leaving?” he finally asks, hushed after their quarrel and the surprise of her news.</p><p>She swallows hard and when she speaks, her voice trembles.</p><p>“Yes. He really is leaving this time, and there is nothing I or anybody else can do to stop it.”</p><p>“I am sorry,” he tells her, and despite her look of disbelief, he really does mean it. He has already seen her weep for her Lord Melbourne once. No doubt he will see her do it again, and he will be sorry that there has been so much pain for her and that he, at least in part, has been the cause.</p><p>“Albert…what happened to your mother?” she finally asks, still looking wary of his apology. “I only know that she died when you were very young, but when you told me about her at the dance…”</p><p>He wishes she would not ask it now, looking so unhappy. He feels his spine tense as she does, because if she thinks he is going to tell her <em>that </em>story now, in the middle of Melbourne leaving and their wedding tomorrow, then she is very mistaken.</p><p>“It doesn’t matter,” he tells her. “You’re right, she died.”</p><p>And she just nods. Victoria above all, he supposes, understands what it is to have secrets.</p><p>They make their way back to the palace, and he can’t help thinking of her, his own mama, as he looks at Victoria. They are so very similar.</p><p>So very similar, and though he loves her for it, he cannot bear it.</p><p>~</p><p>He should, he supposes to himself, not be watching the pair of them from the window, but she has worried him very badly today, with her unsettled mood and unrelenting fears about Prince Albert, and he feels a knot of apprehension ease in his chest, even as a deep and abiding ache settles in to replace it, as he watches her walk back to the palace with the Prince, so much calmer now.</p><p>Even the boy’s face looks transformed, he thinks as they climb the palace steps. He has not been entirely certain of the Prince’s feelings until now, but at the moment there is no denying the love in Prince Albert’s expression toward her.</p><p>It makes him think longingly of Dover House and the brandy awaiting him there, and the Baroness, when she joins him at his view, is for once entirely correct.</p><p>They have been replaced at long last.</p><p>
  <em>That is exactly as it should be.</em>
</p><p>~</p><p>
  <em>She looks recovered that evening at dinner, though when he looks closely, he can see that her eyes are still swollen almost imperceptibly. He wants very badly to ask what the Prince has done to bring her to tears and to thrash him for it, but he also finds that he has no wish to know if the telling of it will only hurt her more. </em>
</p><p><em>He’d followed the Prince up the stairs immediately after their return from the woods, angered beyond good sense at the sight of tear tracks on the Queen’s face, and had made quite plain to the boy, in as civil a tone as he could manage while staring at the fading red mark on the Prince’s cheek, just what his duties as private secretary to the Queen would require him to do if ever Her Majesty’s person were threatened.</em> </p><p>
  <em>She returns to London very early the following day and is nearly inseparable from Dash for the duration of it. He watches her as she fusses over the little dog, brushing the documents he has brought for her to read aside to make room for Dash on her lap. He cannot tell if the preoccupied look she wears is for Dash’s sake alone, or if she is still out of sorts from her ordeal in the woods, but when the next day sees them strolling the palace halls and her shoulders are still drooped and her brow drawn, he cannot help but ask.</em>
</p><p><em>“Is something the matter, Ma’am?”</em> </p><p>
  <em>When she does not immediately answer, but instead fidgets with her fingers, he knows there is.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>“Albert—” and she huffs a sigh and casts her gaze around the portraits hanging from the walls as he waits with a set jaw to hear whatever it is the Prince has done to her now. </em>
</p><p>
  <em>“Albert thinks I am too friendly with you,” she finally says, and to hear her say the words and to hear the discomfort in her tone brings him up short.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Too friendly. Oh, if the Prince could only know what it is he has said. They have, indeed, been far too friendly for a very long time, but to hear it said by her suitor is another thing entirely, and it makes something tighten deep in his chest.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>“And what do you think?”</em>
</p><p>
  <em>“I don’t know,” she sighs. “Albert always looks at me as if I have done something wrong, and I don’t know what to do. I want him to be happy here, or at the very least, content.”</em>
</p><p>
  <em>She looks up at him out of wide, uncertain eyes, and she needn’t say anymore. She means to propose to the Prince, in spite of all, and the boy will spend the rest of his days glowering hungrily at her as he did the night they danced the waltz. She will be married, and she will begin to look to her husband and not to him, and he will relinquish what little bit of her remains to him yet to the boy she thought to send packing straight back to Coburg only weeks ago.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>He dreads it, and the relief he feels in knowing that he has been right, that she can and will recover from him and go on to give her heart without reservation is a bitter one.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>He can feel the missing of her already gathering very slowly inside of him. By the time she is wed he knows it will have grown to a full rage and that it will follow him back to Brocket Hall and never leave, but he sets it aside because she looks so very unsure.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>“Well, if that is your intention, I don’t see how he could resist.”</em>
</p><p>
  <em>And he doesn’t. She is everything good and beautiful. Everything bright and alive. The Prince would have to be blind not to love her.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>“Do you really think so?” she asks as she walks away, and he has said it before, in the privacy of his own mind, but he will say it again now, watching her walk away and wondering how many more chances to do just that he has left:</em>
</p><p>
  <em>“Only a fool would turn you away, Ma’am.”</em>
</p><p>
  <em>~</em>
</p><p>Albert spends a long time trying to fall asleep that night—the <em>last</em> night before his wedding—but all he can think of is Victoria and how very much she reminds him of his mama.</p><p>She has the same sadness, always, he thinks, and perhaps part of the reason he so hates to see her with Lord Melbourne is because watching the two of them together feels like being forced to see first-hand all that he was oblivious to as a child.</p><p>He thinks of her words again. <em>He really is leaving this time, and there is nothing I or anybody else can do to stop it. </em>He thinks of how unhappy she sounded as she said it; how small she had looked, and how lonely.</p><p>He remembers his mama looking the same way, once, and then just a few days later she had been gone.</p><p>And suddenly he understands, in a moment of clarity that has been denied to him, he thinks, since the moment he first climbed in a carriage to come to England, that Victoria is, at this very moment, suffering as his mama did, and that he is the cause. Their marriage may not be by his own design, but it is being done in his name.</p><p>And he cannot do it. He cannot <em>allow </em>it to be done to her, no matter what he thinks of her Lord M—no matter how distasteful he finds the man. At least Melbourne cares for her; loves her, even.</p><p>
  <em>And she loves him.</em>
</p><p>Lord Melbourne cares for her enough to leave her, Albert realizes with sudden, stupefying comprehension. He is a politician—a Prime Minister—he would never step down without being called to do so except that, contrary to all of Albert’s sound reason, Victoria must have the right of it when she says that Melbourne knows his duty to her. That he is too honorable to her, at least, to do anything else.</p><p>Melbourne, the great seducer of women, and wives, and even queens, loves Victoria enough to give both her and his career up to see her married and her throne secure, and though Albert still despises the man and thinks that he will never stop, he can at least admire him for that.</p><p>In leaving her, however, Melbourne will break Victoria’s heart beyond repair. Albert has seen it; he knows it has already begun.</p><p>Victoria has her secrets he knows, even from Lord Melbourne, and for whatever reason, she thinks it is better to put on a show for the man and play the happy bride, but Albert <em>knows</em> her, and she is impossible. She will mourn her Lord M for the rest of her days if he leaves her now, but for whatever reason, she refuses to tell the man the very truth that will make him stay.</p><p>Quite suddenly Albert finds that Uncle Leopold’s wishes no longer matter. He was only a boy when his mother left, but he remembers how she suffered all too well.</p><p>He will not be Victoria’s husband, only to know always that she longs for another man.</p><p>Nor will he watch her suffer the same.</p><p>~</p><p>
  <em>When he receives the Coburgs at the House he thinks he has never seen a less likely consort of England than Prince Albert. But he cannot deny that the boy has the dazed, distracted air of a man just beginning to realize himself infatuated with a woman, and he marvels at the Queen’s ability to make fools of them all.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>~</em>
</p><p>He drinks.</p><p>He has always kept brandy on hand in ample supply, but he has never gone through quite so much in so short a time as he has in the past weeks and months.</p><p>Now he sits in the most comfortable armchair his library has to offer, a glass in his hand and a bottle on the table beside him, and on the night before the Queen’s wedding, he at long last allows himself to truly <em>think</em> of her.</p><p>To see her smile in his mind’s eye and to hear her laugh as though she is sitting beside him.</p><p>
  <em>To remember her.</em>
</p><p>He thinks of the girl he met at Kensington that first day, frightened of the whole world, yet so determined to conquer it all, and then he thinks of her as she is now, a woman grown and beautiful, ready to be a wife and, in due course, a mother, and he <em>aches</em> with the thought of it. Though he knows very well that perhaps no one has witnessed all that has made her into the woman she is so closely as he has, he cannot help the feeling that at some point he must have blinked, and that she grew up and blossomed while he wasn’t looking.</p><p>He pours himself another measure of brandy.</p><p><em>Queen Victoria.</em> She is always so impulsive, so headstrong, too high-spirited for a queen.</p><p>
  <em>Warm.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Affectionate.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Bright.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Stubbornly loyal to the very end.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Incapable of loving with anything but her whole heart.</em>
</p><p>Tomorrow she will become Prince Albert’s wife, and tomorrow night the Prince will be allowed to share her bed, and though he does not want to think of it, can hardly bear to imagine it and cringes away from the thought, Melbourne knows very well that she will be exactly as she always is.</p><p>
  <em>Incandescent beyond measure. Everything he has never once, in all the time since he first looked at her and found her no longer a girl but a woman, permitted himself to desire, for fear that it would consume him.</em>
</p><p>And he will retire to Brocket Hall and obey her. He will, indeed, contemplate his rooks and think of her, <em>always her,</em> and very nearly nothing else.</p><p>Like a rook, wretchedly and irretrievably mated for life.</p><p>He wonders exactly when it was that all hope fled for good and this very outcome became inevitable—at Kensington, or her coronation ball, or when he held her tiny hand in his own and told her about the rooks that nest at Brocket Hall—but then he decides that it hardly matters because ever the fool, he is certain he would do it all again. Certain beyond all doubt that he would be just as fascinated by the girl she was that very first day if he met her again tomorrow, and that there had been no road he could have taken then that would not have ended with him here, terribly, helplessly in love with her and with no recourse but to serve her to the very best of his ability and then to say goodbye.</p><p>
  <em>Which is no easier to do, he finds, than to stop breathing entirely. He has allowed her, most foolishly, to become his sole purpose in life. Watching her from afar, after tomorrow, will be like forcing himself to live on crumbs when he has become accustomed to being offered a feast, and the days ahead of him will be dark ones.</em>
</p><p>He must fall asleep at some point, or perhaps the alcohol has left him in a stupor, because he is startled when his butler shakes him awake and tells him in a frenzied voice that he has a visitor.</p><p>The sky is black through his windows, it is the middle of the night, and in his bleary-eyed confusion he panics because <em>no, it cannot be. She cannot be here so late and tonight of all nights. Why on earth would she be?</em></p><p>And then, in a fantastically horrifying parody of the memory racing through his mind of the Queen’s appearance in this very room, Prince Albert, and not the Queen, is shown into his library.</p><p>~</p><p>
  <em>She does it, though later when she thinks back on it, she will have no idea how she managed it.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Albert is…perhaps not kind, but polite at least, and she wonders at it. He knows enough to ruin her now, enough to ruin Lord M, or at least he thinks he does, yet he has spoken of it to no one and she is so very grateful.</em>
</p><p><em>She stares at the window for a very long time before he arrives for their meeting, and she allows herself to sink into her memories because she once more feels frozen, without a hope of ever being able to move again.</em> </p><p>
  <em>Find a reason to continue, she thinks. You must. She remembers his eyes best of all from that day on the piano bench; from when he told her that she was his reason.</em>
</p><p><em>Her reason is as unchanged as it has ever been.</em> </p><p>
  <em>It seems there is very nearly nothing she will not do to make Lord M proud.</em>
</p><p><em>Then Albert arrives and takes his seat opposite her, and she knows he thinks Lord M flatters her and treats her like a child. How surprised might he be, she wonders, to learn that it is for Lord M that she has finally decided to grow up?</em> </p><p>
  <em>She asks him.</em>
</p><p><em>He says yes.</em> </p><p>
  <em>More than anything, she dreads telling Lord M. It will be so very hard not to cry.</em>
</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Thanks for reading, please leave a comment and let me know what you think!</p><p>I'm also on tumblr @ultravirola and I post progress reports on my fics as well as snippets of future chapters.</p></blockquote></div></div>
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